[josm-dev] control characters in config file

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-12-29 04:25, =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Dirk_St=F6cker?= wrote:
>On Wed, 29 Dec 2010, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
>>   I am slightly unhappy about the fact that we have control characters 
>> (more specifically, the "record separator" 0x1e ...
>
>Yes. I used 0x1E (and yes, I know my standards), as semicolon had lots of 
>troubles, same with comma and everthing else. E.G. the commit comments use 
>all of these characters. Previously it has been ';' as well as ',' and 
>some forms of §.

I don't mind which character is used - it's just that it's inconsistent 
within the file (all of the above are still in use), and undocumented for 
the user. I've had to dig into source to find it.


>The advanced preferences allow to enter fields as well. Generally directly 
>editing the josm config-file is not a recommendable thing anyway and if 
>the person doing so cannot cope with the 0x1E, then he should use the JOSM 
>GUI interface.

That doesn't solve it. Some values have no way to enter them other than the 
"Advanced Preferences" editor. Could we have meta-data somewhere that 
provides a popup when you mouse-over the field in that editor, to tell you 
what the separator is, for the cases where there are either none or one 
value there and it's not obvious?

--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>