7.10.1 assigning a string value to a configurable

The basic syntax is a name followed by a value on a single line. They are separated from each other by either white space, a colon (:) or an equal sign (=). The colon or equal sign may optionally be surrounded by additional white space. If more than one value line is needed, a backslash (\) may be used to continue the value. The backslash (but not the newline) will be erased. Leading and trailing white space is always stripped from the value.

Fundamentally, it looks like this:

name  value for that name
name = another \
     multi-line value \
     for that name.
name: a *third* value for ``name''

If you need more control over the content of the value, you may enclose the value in XML style brackets:

<name>value </name>

Within these brackets you need not (must not) continue the value data with backslashes. You may also select the string formation rules to use, just add the attribute after the name, thus: <name keep>.

`keep'

This mode will keep all text between the brackets and not strip any white space.

`uncooked'

This mode strips leading and trailing white space, but not do any quote processing. This is the default and need not be specified.

`cooked'

Strings are formed and concatenated if, after stripping leading and trailing white space, the text begins and ends with either single (') or double (") quote characters. That processing is identical to the string formation used in AutoGen definition files (see section Basic Expression), except that you may not use backquotes.

And here is an example of an XML-styled value:

<name cooked>
    "This is\n\tanother multi-line\n"
    "\tstring example."
</name>

The string value associated with "name" will be exactly the text enclosed in quotes with the escaped characters "cooked" as you would expect (three text lines with the last line not ending with a newline, but ending with a period).

This document was generated by Bruce Korb on September, 30 2006 using texi2html 1.76.