port name restrictions

[Tim Blechmann-2]

hi all,

i am curious, if there are any restrictions to port names ...
especially, are there any special characters, that are not allowed in
port names and can thus safely be used to separate port names in a string?
e.g. supercollider is using ',' to separate port names in a string, but
i am not sure, whether this is safe ... the specification of
jack_port_register doesn't seem to forbid any characters

thnx, tim

--
tim@...
http://tim.klingt.org

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively
verbalizing.
  William S. Burroughs




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[Paul Davis]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Tim Blechmann <tim@...> wrote:
> hi all,
>
> i am curious, if there are any restrictions to port names ...
> especially, are there any special characters, that are not allowed in
> port names and can thus safely be used to separate port names in a string?
> e.g. supercollider is using ',' to separate port names in a string, but
> i am not sure, whether this is safe ... the specification of
> jack_port_register doesn't seem to forbid any characters

only ':' is forbidden, and even that is a mild, unenforced
restriction. if you named a port 'tim:two" and your client is called
"tim", you will end up with "tim:tim:two". its not impossible that
some JACK clients   might misparse or otherwise misuse this type of
name. JACK itself will always use the leftmost colon as the delimiter
between the client name and the port name.
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[Fons Adriaensen-2]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 10:11:25AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Tim Blechmann <tim@...> wrote:
> > hi all,
> >
> > i am curious, if there are any restrictions to port names ...
> > especially, are there any special characters, that are not allowed in
> > port names and can thus safely be used to separate port names in a string?
> > e.g. supercollider is using ',' to separate port names in a string, but
> > i am not sure, whether this is safe ... the specification of
> > jack_port_register doesn't seem to forbid any characters
>
> only ':' is forbidden, and even that is a mild, unenforced
> restriction. if you named a port 'tim:two" and your client is called
> "tim", you will end up with "tim:tim:two". its not impossible that
> some JACK clients   might misparse or otherwise misuse this type of
> name. JACK itself will always use the leftmost colon as the delimiter
> between the client name and the port name.

Apart from that, Ardour uses '/' to divide its port names into
meaningful parts, e.g. "master/out 1", and all my AMB or other
multichannel related apps will use '.' to denote components of
port groups e.g. "monitor/out.W", "monitor/out.X", etc. The idea
here is that tools such as qjackctl would be expected to display
such a group as a single port unless the user wants it expanded,
and to connect corresponding channels with a single user action.
This is sort of practical when using e.g. multiple 3rd order AMB
ports (16 channels each) which are a pain to connect otherwise.

If you really want to put multiple port names in a single C
string use something non-printable to separate them. I've
never seen a port name with a newline in it and most apps
would have problems with such a name, so newline could be
a good choice.

Another matter: IIRC the current max port name length is
256, which is on the high side. How many GUI apps would
be able to display a name of that length ? Something like
64 would make more sense.

Ciao,

--
FA

Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.

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[Tim Blechmann-2]

On 09/19/2009 04:11 PM, Paul Davis wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Tim Blechmann <tim@...> wrote:
>> hi all,
>>
>> i am curious, if there are any restrictions to port names ...
>> especially, are there any special characters, that are not allowed in
>> port names and can thus safely be used to separate port names in a string?
>> e.g. supercollider is using ',' to separate port names in a string, but
>> i am not sure, whether this is safe ... the specification of
>> jack_port_register doesn't seem to forbid any characters
>
> only ':' is forbidden, and even that is a mild, unenforced
> restriction. if you named a port 'tim:two" and your client is called
> "tim", you will end up with "tim:tim:two". its not impossible that
> some JACK clients   might misparse or otherwise misuse this type of
> name. JACK itself will always use the leftmost colon as the delimiter
> between the client name and the port name.

ah, ok ... i already had the assumption, that i need some escaping
mechanism to separate port names in a string correctly

tim

--
tim@...
http://tim.klingt.org

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
  Igor Stravinsky



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