Re: Using dashes and colons in directive parameter names

Friday, June 15, 2012, 5:48:59 PM, Eirik Lygre wrote:

> We have a user defined directive which can be called from
> freemarker as shown below The directive will use some well-defined
> parameters (here "name"), but will output all other directives
> directly, so that you can do for example this:
>
>    [@form.input name="task.dateFormat" /]
>    [@form.input name="task.dateFormat" class="dateInput important
> required" style="display:block" accesskey="D" /]
>
> Now, we have seen the requirement to generate attributes with
> special characters, such as with xml namespaces or html 5 custom data attributes. For example:
>
>    [@form.input name="task.dateFormat" xml:lang="no" data-format="dd.mm.yyyy" /]
>
> This fails during parse. I tried the obvious, quoting the parameter
> names, but that did not work. (Now, using special names would
> probably not work for macros, but our directives are implemented in
> java, and the parameters are passed as a straight array, with no syntax constraints).
>
->> Is it possible (today) to use parameter names with special characters?

No. You will have to go with "data_format" and if necessary, translate
it to "date-format" later.

->> How about tomorrow-ish  

The case of "-" is a well-known problem. So it's admitted that this
should be improved. When will that happen... I can't tell.

BTW, I don't think it can be fixed without breaking
backward-compatibility. There's a historical mistake that the ==
operator can be written as =. But when something looks like a
parameter name, the parsers sees = as a named parameter assignment
instead. But that doesn't stand for [@foo "data-format"="bar" /], as
it's currently interpreted as [@foo "data-format" == "bar" /] (a
single position parameter with boolean value). Changing this wouldn't
be backward-compatible.

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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