[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: bug report: emacs-wiki.el -- recognizing extended links

[Michael Olson]

"Raymond Zeitler" <address@hidden> writes:

> First, the [:space:] construct works only in v21 of Emacs, according to
> the eLisp manual.  Here's an excerpt from the node "Special Characters
> in Regular Expressions":

Good catch.  I'm going to write `emacs-wiki-skip-chars-forward' and
`emacs-wiki-skip-chars-backward' for the next emacs-wiki release,
which will take care of this problem.

Happily, at least re-search-forward and its friends do support
character classes in Emacs 21, and that is probably the latest version
of Emacs that I will try to support.

> Second, there is no Planner / Emacs-wiki documentation that thoroughly
> describes the syntax of [[some_URL][some text].  This should be given
> its own node accessible from the top node of PlannerInfo.  The issue of
> whether spaces can be used should be mentioned, as well as instruction
> on how to *properly* change that behavior.  Valid protocol options can
> be mentioned as well:  bbdb://, bookmark://, irc://, lisp://, etc, with
> links to their respective nodes.

You're right.  I can put this in emacs-wiki.texi.

> Third, given the second point, it doesn't matter whether the Planner
> Maintainer makes "spaces in links" the default because the user can
> customize the behavior.  FWIW, my preference is to allow spaces in
> links.  Windows users have ridiculously long path names (with spaces
> in them) to such important directories as "desktop" and "my
> documents".  How do I refer to them?  And I'm surprised to witness
> the "protect the user from him/herself" mentality that led to the
> banning of spaces from links.  That's what `
> emacs-wiki-markup-nonexistent-link' is for.

After rethinking this, I agree.  Windows users will have spaces in
their pathnames by default in some places, and spaces are allowed as
valid chars in GNU/Linux paths (although they make life harder for
shell script writers, which doesn't matter in this case).

I'll change the regexps so that they allow spaces in the first part of
extended links.  Thanks for the analysis.

-- 
Michael Olson -- FSF Associate Member #652 -- Web: http://www.mwolson.org/
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