Re: Audit Parsing Library Requirements

I'd like to suggest a convention for representing name/value pairs made available through the parsing library. As stated before, I'd like to be sure that the strings returned as the name and as the value of a field contain 7-bit ASCII characters excluding zero. The question is what happens if a value represents binary data. Such a value might appear in the log if the initial sequence of the second argument of a write system call is recorded. I suggest that in the string returned as the name or value of a field, we let the alphanumeric characters, space, and the following graphic characters stand for themselves: !#%^*(_)~+=~[]'|;:{},.<>/?$@`. The characters that can be represented as a single character escape in a C string would be represented the same way in a value, and the remaining characters would be represented as a backslash, followed by the letter 'x', followed by two hexidecimal digits. With this specification, a value could be wrapped in double quotes, and become a C string constant. Note with this specification, characters such as '\t' and '\n' would appear quoted, and programs can make use of this fact. John Steve Grubb <sgrubb(a)redhat.com&gt; writes: ...