config.txt: describe handling of whitespace further

Make it more clear what the whitespace characters are in the context of git
configuration files, and significantly improve the description of the leading
and trailing whitespace handling, especially how it works out together with
the presence of inline comments.

Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Helped-by: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Signed-off-by: Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index 229b63a454c035dcd6fa6797b29788ae67c053a4..d8dd1a71e7db460bed4ac1bfb1e5e5aacaeb3981 100644 (file)
--- 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
@@ -63,16 +64,17 @@ the variable is the boolean "true").
 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
-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.
-
-Inside double quotes, double quote `"` and backslash `\` characters
-must be escaped: use `\"` for `"` and `\\` for `\`.
+Whitespace characters surrounding `name`, `=` and `value` are discarded.
+Internal whitespace characters within 'value' are retained verbatim.
+Comments starting with either `#` or `;` and extending to the end of line
+are discarded.  A line that defines a value can be continued to the next
+line by ending it with a backslash (`\`);  the backslash and the end-of-line
+characters are discarded.
+
+If `value` needs to contain leading or trailing whitespace characters,
+it must be enclosed in double quotation marks (`"`).  Inside double quotation
+marks, double quote (`"`) and backslash (`\`) characters must be escaped:
+use `\"` for `"` and `\\` for `\`.
 
 The following escape sequences (beside `\"` and `\\`) are recognized:
 `\n` for newline character (NL), `\t` for horizontal tabulation (HT, TAB)