Re: ABNF to Draft -- pending issues

On Mon March 7 2005 20:00, Bill Fenner wrote:

> http://www.ops.ietf.org/abnf/parser.tar.gz
[...] 
> appears to only
> accept at most two characters in %x00.00.00.00 style string and because
> you only accept uppercase hex digits in %x constructs.

I believe that implementation also fails to recognize %D, %X, and %B.
[i.e. upper-case letters introducing decimal, hexadecimal, and binary
character literals]

>   I'll also note that your parser doesn't permit either blank lines
> or multi-line prose-vals;
> 
> forbin% cat blankline
> a = b
> 
>  c

If the "blank" line contains whitespace, then it is an RFC 2234
continuation line:

        c-wsp          =  WSP / (c-nl WSP)

N.B. the WSP after c-nl.  If the "blank" line does not contain WSP,
then it terminates the rule, and indeed the line beginning " c" is
a syntax error:

        rule           =  rulename defined-as elements c-nl
                               ; continues if next line starts
                               ;  with white space

        c-nl           =  comment / CRLF
                               ; comment or newline

        comment        =  ";" *(WSP / VCHAR) CRLF

[ignoring the bogus CR requirement].

> forbin% ./parser blankline
> Rule: a = b
> Not OK
> Syntax error: c<*>
> 
> forbin% cat proseval 
> proseval = <This is a multi-line prose-val,
>             which rfc2234 does not permit.>
> 
> forbin% ./parser proseval 
> Not OK
> Syntax error: proseval = <This is a multi-line prose-val,
> <*>          

Note that there is (or was) a published erratum which would make
that legal.  As discussed on the rfc-interest mailing list [
consensus appeared to be that that erratum is itself an error].