Subject: Ambiguous pathNAME in ABNF?

From: Jo Friedman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 09:57:48 -0700

Is this rule is ambiguous?

; Total length of pathNAME must not exceed 64 chars.
pathNAME             = ["*"] NAME *("/" / "*"/ ALPHA / DIGIT /"_"
)

because a NAME must end with an ALPHA, DIGIT, or _ according to
NAME                 = ALPHA *63(ALPHA / DIGIT / "_" )

how does one know where the NAME ends and the
*("/" / "*"/ ALPHA / DIGIT /"_" )
begins?

Jo

---

From: Abdallah Rayhan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:32:06 -0500

This PR is a victim of what terminationID should be! As it evolved
the PR got relaxed a bit to allow "/" and "*" into the name for reasons
you would find if you dig through the archive. Would some parsing
tools consider it to be ambiguous ? Very possible. A programmer
may want to work around some of the PRs, e.g., pathName could be
rewritten as
pathNAME          = ["*"] ALPHA *("/" / "*"/ ALPHA / DIGIT /"_" )

Does this mean that the current ABNF is ambiguous ? Definitely NOT.

Abdallah Rayhan