Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 15:13:33 +0200 (MET DST) From: Arno Hollosi Subject: Re: SGF - request for final comments David Fotland writes: > There are many fields that are more tightly spec'ed for format in FF[4] > than before (ISO date, results, etc). I've looked at what's out there > in sgf files and I don't plan to write code to parse and convert it to > the standard format. It's a lot of work, and frankly, it makes the > data less readable for the users. I also don't plan to move this text > to the game comment field. I think the users would like to see the result > in the same place for all game records. Note: FF[3] already recommended using these formats. I think it's crucial to specify DT & RE (and others) tightly. Because in big game archives it's important that you can use tools that can automatically check the date or the result (for sorting, searching etc.) With results like RE[Black resigns] or RE[John wins] (and PB[John]) this cannot be done. Same goes for dates in non ISO way, e.g. MM-DD-YYYYY or even writing DT[a nice sunny afternoon on the sixth of April 1996] ISO dates may not be standard in America, but it isn't hard to write a function that transforms ISO dates into a nice string (doens't have ANSI lib such a function?) which can be used for displaying. It's just like TM, BL, WL, KM or HA. Do you really display 'B has 375 seconds left'? Or don't you do a simple calculation and print 'Black time left: 6:15'? How should an app calculate the score if the komi is given as KM[five and a half points]? SGF is used world wide. Applications may transform the values into (language dependent) strings for presentation. But this is only possible if the value is tighlty specified. Same is true for tools used for maintaining large SGF archives. > So, my question is: since I will be writing files that do not conform > to the spec, can I still put FF[4] in them? I also don't plan to check Well, I guess there will be incorrect FF[4] files anyway, but writing them delibaretly is no good idea. I don't understand why you don't want to move bad values to the GC field. Well, you would have to write some code to check if values are correct, but that can't be the reason? If yes, use my code written for the SGF Syntax Checker & Converter. /Arno