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Change character @ to ! to indicate special meta data lines #6

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ibnesayeed opened this issue Oct 19, 2016 · 3 comments
Open

Change character @ to ! to indicate special meta data lines #6

ibnesayeed opened this issue Oct 19, 2016 · 3 comments

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@ibnesayeed
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@johnerikhalse pointed out in the slack channel that using @ as the meta lines prefix does not surface meta lines above the data records when using LC_ALL=C locale.

It is the metadata starting with '@' that doesn't sort right. The meta fields will sort between surts with ip numbers and surts with hostnames.

We should consider changing the special prefix character to ! instead which is the first printable character with the ASCII character code 33, only after the space character.

@machawk1
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This change has a sound rationale. What was the basis for @ originally?

@ibnesayeed
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What was the basis for @ originally?

@ was chosen due to the primary use case of it being used in CDX files and archive profiles. I thought the first field will almost always be a letter in those cases, but missed the fact that digits have a lower ASCII value than @ which will appear very commonly when IP addresses are SURTed. I did consider that SPACE character was the first one in printable characters, but it was not a good choice as it is very easy miss that or mess up with indentations. I didn't realize that ! was the next character and thought @ is pretty early in the ASCII table. I should have checked the ASCII table before.

@johnerikhalse
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I guess that inspiration from json-ld also influenced the choise of using @.

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