[hashcash] Re: new format tweak coming...
- From: "Eric S. Johansson" <esj@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: hashcash@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 22:54:27 -0500
Justin Mason wrote:
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> Hubert Chan writes:
>
>>>>>>>"Justin" == Justin Mason <jm@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>Adam> Yes I had come to think the same thing ... re "'" or '"' as the
>>Adam> two choices, and this is the "perl" thing, plus "\"'" and '"'\'
>>
>>Ben> This is icky - whatever format you use should, IMO, be regex
>>Ben> friendly, and trivial to parse. This is neither. I'd vote for URL
>>Ben> encoding.
>>
>>Justin> +1 on this idea -- me too. URL encoding is much easier to parse
>>Justin> than backslashing.
>>
>>My personal opinion is that since the stamps are primarily meant for
>>computer consumption, to just use a single type of quotes, and
>>backslash-escape the quotes, and backslash. It takes a bit less
>>processing, and is still fairly readable if anyone wants to look at the
>>stamp.
>>
>>I don't see backslashing any harder to parse than URL encoding -- just
>>scan through the string from left to right, and every time you see a
>>backslash, drop it and take the next character as a literal.
>>
>>I also don't see backslashing, or having two types of quotes, as being
>>regex unfriendly.
>
>
> Oh good, you'd be happy to provide a regex that'll do the above
> left-to-right scan to cope with
>
> foo:"bar \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\":baz":blargh
>
> then. as far as I know it can be done with perl re's, but
> I don't know the recipe off-hand ;)
"(\w\s\\*)" should be a good starting point. and to be totally correct
the expression should be:
foo="bar \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\":baz="blargh" because every attribute is of a
form (\w)="(.*): including the last entry because that's the :
introducing the random field.
I think the question we should be asking is "what's the interface". To
append or generate over a list of these and to normalize the data coming
into or out of the interface is really what we should be concerned with
at this point. URL encoding or \ quoting is just picking over the
bones. Personally, I think that picking a format and then not supplying
any interfaces parsing it is just plain cruel. we, as a profession
waste away too much time reinventing wheels.
so, to me a simple interface would be best. But it is far too late for
me to think clearly on how to do so. But I just wanted to raise the
idea of looking at hashcash as a library with a command line wrapper
instead of a command line program used as a library. (hashcashd??)
more tomorrow.
---eric
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