Semicolons in plugin output

[Andreas Ericsson]

Jason Hoos wrote:
> Quick question - what is the reason behind the conversion of semicolons 
> in plug-in output to colons?  Is it to prevent issues with parsing of 
> status.dat?
> 

I believe this is because the plugin-output is usually sent to other commands
via the shell (fe, notifications). Semi-colon is a special shell character
and as such should never be sent there raw.

If the above explanation is the case, it would be better (and slightly
better, performance-wise) to do the semicolon-to-colon conversion when
the string is passed to the shell.

> The reason I ask is that I have some plug-ins that output HTML entities 
> (which all end in semicolons of course),

Why do they end in semicolons? I'd have thought a greater-than sign would
end HTML entities. Mind you, those are also special shell characters.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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