Make it more clear what the whitespace characters are in the context of git configuration, improve the description of the trailing whitespace handling, and correct the description of the value-internal whitespace handling. Signed-off-by: Dragan Simic <dsimic@xxxxxxxxxxx> --- Documentation/config.txt | 19 +++++++++++-------- 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt index 782c2bab906c..4480bb44203b 100644 --- a/Documentation/config.txt +++ b/Documentation/config.txt @@ -22,9 +22,10 @@ multivalued. Syntax ~~~~~~ -The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive; whitespaces are mostly -ignored. The '#' and ';' characters begin comments to the end of line, -blank lines are ignored. +The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive. Whitespace characters, +which in this context are the space character (SP) and the horizontal +tabulation (HT), are mostly ignored. The '#' and ';' characters begin +comments to the end of line. Blank lines are ignored. The file consists of sections and variables. A section begins with the name of the section in square brackets and continues until the next @@ -64,12 +65,14 @@ The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric characters and `-`, and must start with an alphabetic character. A line that defines a value can be continued to the next line by -ending it with a `\`; the backslash and the end-of-line are -stripped. Leading whitespaces after 'name =', the remainder of the +ending it with a `\`; the backslash and the end-of-line are stripped. +Leading whitespace characters after 'name =', the remainder of the line after the first comment character '#' or ';', and trailing -whitespaces of the line are discarded unless they are enclosed in -double quotes. Internal whitespaces within the value are retained -verbatim. +whitespace characters of the line are discarded unless they are enclosed +in double quotes. This discarding of the trailing whitespace characters +also applies after the remainder of the line after the comment character +is discarded. Any number of internal whitespace characters found within +the value are converted to the same number of space (SP) characters. Inside double quotes, double quote `"` and backslash `\` characters must be escaped: use `\"` for `"` and `\\` for `\`.
