[asterisk-dev] Parsing in Asterisk

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Monday 12 March 2007, Tim Ringenbach wrote:
> On 3/12/07, Tilghman Lesher <tilghman at mail.jeffandtilghman.com> wrote:
> > On Monday 12 March 2007 16:51, Sean Bright wrote:
> > > I am probably missing some history, but why doesn't parsing of
> > > arguments happen before the apps even get involved?  Purely for BC
> > > reasons?
> >
> > It simply never has, and some uses would preclude that from ever
> > happening (such as using app Exec or by passing arguments from a
> > database).
>
> I'm probably also missing some history.
> I'm left wondering what all changes will need to be done by the
> applications parser, vs what all changes are at the extensions.conf

Thankfully, since most apps already use a macro for parsing, most of the
change will consist simply of changing the macro.

> level.Why is the comma preferred to the pipe if apps already parse the
> pipe?

It makes the dialplan easier to read (for humans).

> I'm also wondering how this will effect things like ExecIf and using Exec
> from inside an AGI script (something I find myself doing often).

I don't think that it will affect it much at all, other than the fact that
your present pipe delimiters will need to be translated to the comma.  As
I said, this would be a flag day event.

> I remember once trying to figure out how to assign a new line to a dialplan
> variable, and I concluded it wasn't possible. Is that true, and if so,
> would this also fix that?

It is still not possible, but only because we aren't handling escape
characters in that way.  That's certainly one item which would become far
easier if we got rid of the need to do so much escaping and quoting.

-- 
Tilghman