[4/4] config.txt: describe handling of whitespace further

Commit Message

Dragan Simic March 15, 2024, 1:22 p.m. UTC

Make it more clear what the whitespace characters are in the context of git
configuration files, and improve the description of the trailing whitespace
handling a bit.

Signed-off-by: Dragan Simic <[e-mail]>
---
 Documentation/config.txt | 19 +++++++++++--------
 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)

Patch

diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index 782c2bab906c..20f3300dc706 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -22,9 +22,10 @@  multivalued.
 Syntax
 ~~~~~~
 
-The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive; whitespaces are mostly
-ignored.  The '#' and ';' characters begin comments to the end of line,
-blank lines are ignored.
+The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive.  Whitespace characters,
+which in this context are the space character (SP) and the horizontal
+tabulation (HT), are mostly ignored.  The '#' and ';' characters begin
+comments to the end of line.  Blank lines are ignored.
 
 The file consists of sections and variables.  A section begins with
 the name of the section in square brackets and continues until the next
@@ -64,12 +65,14 @@  The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric characters
 and `-`, and must start with an alphabetic character.
 
 A line that defines a value can be continued to the next line by
-ending it with a `\`; the backslash and the end-of-line are
-stripped.  Leading whitespaces after 'name =', the remainder of the
+ending it with a `\`; the backslash and the end-of-line are stripped.
+Leading whitespace characters after 'name =', the remainder of the
 line after the first comment character '#' or ';', and trailing
-whitespaces of the line are discarded unless they are enclosed in
-double quotes.  Internal whitespaces within the value are retained
-verbatim.
+whitespace characters of the line are discarded unless they are enclosed
+in double quotes.  The discarding of the trailing whitespace characters
+applies regardless of the discarding of the portion of the line after
+the first comment character.  Internal whitespace characters within the
+value are retained verbatim.
 
 Inside double quotes, double quote `"` and backslash `\` characters
 must be escaped: use `\"` for `"` and `\\` for `\`.