Make it more clear what the whitespace characters are in the context of git
configuration files, and improve the description of the trailing whitespace
handling a bit, especially how it works out together with the presence of
inline comments.
Signed-off-by: Dragan Simic <dsimic@xxxxxxxxxxx>
---
Notes:
Changes in v3:
- Patch description was expanded a bit, to make it more on point
- No changes to the documentation were introduced
Changes in v2:
- No changes were introduced
Documentation/config.txt | 19 +++++++++++--------
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index 782c2bab906c..20f3300dc706 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. The discarding of the trailing whitespace characters
+applies regardless of the discarding of the portion of the line after
+the first comment character. Internal whitespace characters within the
+value are retained verbatim.
Inside double quotes, double quote `"` and backslash `\` characters
must be escaped: use `\"` for `"` and `\\` for `\`.
