Re: Using ncurses only for terminfo (no I/O)

[Grant Edwards]

On 2021-01-19, Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 06:35:11AM +0000, Nicholas Marriott wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 05:57:48PM -0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
>>> On 2021-01-18, Nicholas Marriott <nicholas.marriott@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> tmux has been stripping padding from the result of tiget*() and writing
>>>> it itself for 10 years now and I have had no problems reported
>>>> whatsoever.
>>> 
>>> That's what my code currently does. One thing I'm wondering about is
>>> what happens when a terminal control sequence contains a string like
>>> $<5> that looks like a delay specification? Is that escaped somehow in
>>> the database and then unescaped by putp() or tputs() when the padding
>>> is added?
>> 
>> I don't know of any sequences which actually needs to output $<.

I don't either, but I couldn't see how that it was guaranteed not
to. Were terminal manufacturers all aware of $<N> being reserved for
terminfo strings and agreed not to use it?

> Florian's example was based on string substitution, which isn't used much.
> Aside from documenting this in the manual page, I don't see a need for
> additional changes in ncurses, unless there's a demonstrated need.

I'm not proposing any change to curses. It just seemed like my code
was incomplete/incorrect since I couldn't figure out how it could
properly handle the case where there was something like $<5> in a
terminal's control sequence.

--
Grant