[Dxspider-support] Long comment fields

Dirk Koopman djk at tobit.co.uk
Sun Feb 9 11:22:45 GMT 2003


On Sun, 2003-02-09 at 03:53, Kelly Jones wrote:
> Hi Dirk, et al...
> 
> Something I've noticed about Spider is that it allows long comment 
> fields.  This creates a problem for applications that "scrape" information 
> since the timestamp is not where it's expected to be.
> 
> Is there a reason to allow more than 30 characters in the comment 
> field?  Just curious.  Has this issue been discussed before?  If it's 
> something that could be implemented without objection, that would be 
> great.  If there is a reason to have long fields, would it be possible to 
> point me to the file where the comment field is created and I could do it 
> locally.

This has come up before. I could easily limit it but previous consensus
says don't. There are some issues to do with de-duping (which may no
longer apply, I would need to think about this).

In fact, I think you will find that AK1A allowed longer comment fields
(although I may be confusing that with talk and announce). From a
software point of view, I have no problem parsing it but then I would
(intelligently) pattern match parse such a thing and never *ever* treat
it as a fixed length record (because it isn't).

AFAIK I have tried, really quite hard, to make the user output
'compatible' and the last request for this or that change from a log
program author was about a year ago (dxtelnet).

Dirk 
-- 
Please Note: Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That When the
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