Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql

On Thu, 8 Jan 2009, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:

>> Some people suggests that this is so close to rst that I should just use
>> it as if it were, and hand-edit the output for the rare cases where it
>> doesn't comply.  I don't find this very compelling.
>
> The cases are so rare that I can't remember what they were if any.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-08/msg01310.php had 
Tom's concerns.  Since the ReST Grid Tables you're using is built with the 
characters "-", "=", "|", and "+", those would seem the minimum that would 
need to be escaped with a \, along with the \ itself, before this would be 
likely to work with arbitrary table input.

After spending some time assembling a list of special characters, I had an 
ah-ha moment when I realized they are all listed in the "Sections" section 
as "section title adornment characters":

! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~

Every markup character I found elsewhere shows up in this list, so that 
seems like the definitive one:  escape any character that appears there 
with a \, and I don't see any obvious cases left that will keep this from 
being valid ReST output.  Shouldn't be a lot of code to add that feature, 
and then I think most of the criticism of this patch would go away.

I also note that there are some bullet and arrow inputs it will treat as 
special, see "Bullet Lists" in 
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html
Seems reasonable to just document that non-ASCII input is somewhat 
perilious as a known limitation.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD