[opentheory-users] quoted strings

[Joe Hurd]

Hi Ramana,

> First of all, what does it mean to obtain a string by matching a
> regular expression?

Good question: I've tightened up the language to

"A name command is a string that matches the following regular expression:"

> And then you're left with the string, you discard the quotes, but what
> about the slashes inside the string?

You leave the slashes in the string. The most important property here
is that equality of names is the same as equality of the strings
representing them. For example, the two names

A.b

and

A\.b

are different, so it is good that they are represented by different
strings (because the slashes are left in).

This is all that automatic tools for processing articles need to know.
However, for the purpose of displaying names in human-readable form,
the names might undergo some further processing, so A.b is actually
treated as the name b in the namespace A, and A\.b is treated as the
name A\.b in the global namespace, and as a result "show" tags might
transform them differently.

In my eyes an import tool falls into the "automatic tools" category,
so I don't think you need to worry about the human readability angle.

Does that help?

Cheers,

Joe