[Vorbis] newlines in vorbis comments
Haxe
haxe at pansensack.de
Fri Sep 17 12:36:20 PDT 2004
> I curious; why do you need newlines?
Oh, I have seen this too.
There seem to be some apps out there that offer you to enter a longer
text, including newlines and all, into the COMMENT= field. And that
sounds quite sensible to me.
I personally don't use this. But it would feel safer if I could handle
these tags with vobiscomment without risking data loss.
The problem with vorbiscomment is the following.
The documentation says:
> -c commentfile
> Take comments from a file. The file is the same format as is output by
> the -l option;
But this is simply not true. The -l option can indeed generate output
that can't be re-imported by the -c option. This is exactly the case
when any exported comment contains a newline. This is because, whereas
the internal representation of vorbistags may be binary-safe, the
format of the commentfile is NOT binary-safe.
Therefore, I suggest to introduce two new options to vorbiscomment:
-e = export tags to a binary-safe format
-i = import tags binary-safe, expected format is like the output of -e
> However ´newline´ isn´t quite what you think it is (it is a
> different charachter on different platforms. A Mac newline in an Ogg
> comment won´t work on a PC, etc....). Newline isn´t a language
> charachter, it´s a platform-specific control-code.
Yes indeed, this is another issue. While the first point was a problem
of vorbiscomment that applies to binary data in general, this problem
is specially about newline characters and has nothing to do with
vorbiscomment in particular.
But this can also be solved. The solution is more organizational that
technical:
I'm writing this email on a unix-like system, and it will be read by
people using other platforms. So obviously, you CAN have
platform-independent newlines in email. This is possible because people
using different platforms agreed over the allowed newline
representations used in email. I think, the same could be achieved for
vorbis tags.
Greetz,
Hauke Hachmann
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