<html><head><title>VCP::Newlines - Newline, ^Z, and NULL handling in VCP</title></head><body><h1><a name="NAME">NAME
</a></h1><p>VCP::Newlines - Newline, ^Z, and NULL handling in VCP
<p><hr><h1><a name="DESCRIPTION">DESCRIPTION
</a></h1><p>Newlines can be a bear to debug, since most display programs hide the
difference between <code>\r\n</code>, <code>\r</code>, and <code>\n</code> from you.
<p>VCP copes with newlines thusly:
<dl><dt><a name="1_"><strong><p>1.
</strong></a><dd>When reading/writing repositories (Cvs, Perforce, etc), it lets them sweat
the details.
<dt><a name="2_"><strong><p>2.
</strong></a><dd>RevML text (non-binary) files always use single newline "\n" endings internally
for both content and patches. Due to XML handling, any "\r\n" or "\r"
sequences that sneak in to an XML file get converted to "\n" anyway.
<dt><a name="3_"><strong><p>3.
</strong></a><dd>RevML binary files use an escape like <char code="0x0d"/> to encode carriage
returns and other character codes illegal in XML texts.
<dt><a name="4_"><strong><p>4.
</strong></a><dd><a href="Source/revml.html">VCP::Source::revml</a> can be asked to convert "\n" to "\r\n"
on the fly in text files. It never does this by default because most
modern-day editors do the right thing (<code>notepad.exe</code> is *not* modern day :).
<dt><a name="5_"><strong><p>5.
</strong></a><dd><a href="Dest/revml.html">VCP::Dest::revml</a> always converts "\r\n" and "\r" in to "\n"
for consistancy's sake, so the RevML file extracted on a Windows machine should
be identical (or at least more nearly so) to one extracted on a Unix machine.
The metadata might differ a bit, of course, but at least the content won't.
</dl><p>Embedded Control-Z characters <code>^Z</code> (ASCII 26) are passed through, as are
embedded NULLs. Both the diff and patch code are ^Z and NULL clean as well
(unlike many).
<p><code>vcp</code> treats all files as binary files and uses it's own <code>\r\n</code> conversion
routines specifically to be able to pass <code>^Z</code> through unmolested, since not
passing things through can mess up both end users with loitering <code>^Z</code>
characters and <code>vcp</code>'s checksums.
<p>If you think you have issues like these, see the document
<a href="Maintenance.html">VCP::Maintenance</a> for some options and tools that can help
when debugging.
<p><hr><i><font size="-1">Last updated: Fri Nov 8 13:07:23 2002</font></i></body></html>