Re: [tap] More uncertainty about junk lines

[Ovid <[e-mail]>]

>________________________________
>From: Andrew Rodland <[e-mail]>
>To: "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>; "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>
>Sent: Friday, 24 June 2011, 15:08
>Subject: [tap] More uncertainty about junk lines
>
>
>Once again I'm working on my parser and trying to deal with some ambiguities, and I'm realizing that I may be mistaken about the handling of junk lines. What does "any line that does not parse must be ignored" in the draft spec really mean? Does it mean lines that couldn't possibly be TAP in any position (in which case we can still throw an error on out-of-sequence TAP) or does it mean any line that can't parse in *this* position, in which case there are no true parse errors at all? In other words, is this TAP:
>1..3
>ok 1
>ok 2
>1..1
>ok 3
>valid with an ignored fourth line, or does it have an error on the fourth line?


That's a very annoying edge case you have there, but I would argue that anything which *could* be parsed as a TAP line MUST be parsed as such, thus rendering the above invalid. Otherwise, we'd have no idea if you were spitting out bad TAP or something else was spitting out junk which happened to look like TAP.
 
Thus:

* If something *can* be parsed as a TAP line, do so, even if it renders the TAP document invalid.
* If something *can't* be parsed as a TAP line, ignore it.

Cheers,
Ovid
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