/ in annotations

[codalogic]

We currently define what's allowed in tbd directives and annotations as:

multi-line-parameters = *(comment / q-string / regex /
                   not-multi-line-special)

The presence of regex means that any / characters in the parameters will be treated as forming a regular expression. This allows assertion annotations like:

"link" : @{assert ($other == "ok" && $ =~ /p\d{1,2}/i) ||
          ($other == "bad" && $ =~ /x\d{1,3}/i) } string

But is problematic if we want to have assertion annotations such as:

"size" : @{assert $ / 4 == 2} integer

We could fix that by having something like:

"size" : @{assert $ idiv 4 == 2} integer

where idiv means integer divide.

But that doesn't allow for something like:

"geo" : @{abnf 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT ("N" / "S") "," 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT ("E" / "W") } string

We could remove the special meaning for /, and say if you want a regex in an annotation, then you have to define some sort of function, such as:

"link" : @{assert ($other == "ok" && re( $, "/p\d{1,2}/i" )) ||
          ($other == "bad" && re( $, "/x\d{1,3}/i" )) } string

That would basically means changing the above rule to:

multi-line-parameters = *(comment / q-string /
                   not-multi-line-special)
not-multi-line-special = spaces / %x21 / %x23-3A /
                   %x3C-7C / %x7E-10FFFF ; not ", ; or }

[anewton1998]

This seems reasonable to me. Make it so!

[codalogic]

:-)

[codalogic]

One slight issue with putting regexes in q-string is that, where we want, say \d we have to do \\d, e.g.:

"link" : @{assert re( $, "/p\\d{1,2}\\n/i" ) } string

We could consider supporting the Ruby style single quoted string that only allows escaping `. Then we could allow:

"link" : @{assert re( $, '/p\d{1,2}\n/i' ) } string

If you think that's important let me know. At the moment we probably have bigger fish to fry.