Message-ID:  <201101030052.p030qEUM014652@freefriends.org>
Date:         Mon, 3 Jan 2011 00:52:14 GMT
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              <LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de>
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From: Karl Berry <karl@FREEFRIENDS.ORG>
Subject: Re: xparse: read arg until EOL
To: LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de
In-Reply-To:  <4D204F18.2060705@gmx.de>
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Status: R

    I just thought it might be good to have an argument type that reads an
    argument until the end of line. That would be a special version of the u
    type, I think, but the normal user will not be able to specify it that
    way. 
    Any comments?

Based on my experience with Texinfo, my comment is that robust parsing
of arguments delimited by end-of-line is essentially impossible.  I
fully agree with Joseph: I wouldn't go there. 

    (Also I'm not sure about different line endings in *nix and Windows.)

That isn't the problem.  The engines have always unified the various
platform-specific line endings to \endlinechar (otherwise TeX
portability would be a nonstarter).  The problem is distinguishing eol
from space (gets converted very early in processing), handling the
contexts of active eol vs. normal eol, doing all this inside other
macros, etc. ... it's a steep and slippery slope.

If you want to convert from TeX to OOo, my suggestion is to use an
external program.  An eol-delimited macro will hardly be a panacea for
that job, as you yourself pointed out.

k