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Parsing the Interface File

Interface File parsing is case-insensitive, the file is interpreted as a sequence of tokens, where a token is a sequence of characters which are either all alphanumeric (with .;:+-()_[]"'<> being honorary alphanumerics) or all non-alphanumeric (i.e. anything other than alphanumeric and `white'). Tokens are thus terminated by anything of the opposite class or by a `white' character. For this purpose, `white' characters are space, tab, newline, comma or non-printable. Apart from their role as delimiters, `white' characters are not significant.

The one exception to this is that, as a special case, a token may be a quoted string, i.e. a character string consisting of a set of characters enclosed in single quotes. The first quote must be the first character of the token and the token is terminated by the next isolated (i.e. not '') quote or the end of line. Thus two consecutive quotes in a quoted string will be interpreted as a single quote to be contained in the string.

Tokens may be one of:

Fields (but not tokens) may be split across lines if necessary.

Everything following # on a line (except within a character string) will be ignored. Thus # can be used to introduce comments.





next up previous 63
Next: Parameter, Action and Keyword Names
Up: ADAM Interface Module Reference Manual
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ADAM Interface Module Reference Manual
Starlink User Note 115
A J Chipperfield, B D Kelly, S L Wright
3 September 2002
E-mail:ussc@star.rl.ac.uk

Copyright © 2002 Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils