[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
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