Paul,
The following produces two lines of comment:
COMMENT=_FractInt_$version$.$patch$_\\\\\\$_$\\/_PASSES=t
|....,....1....,....2....,....3....,....4 ---|----------------------------------------- 1 | FractInt 2004.3 \\\\\$ 2 | PASSES=t |
Because the comment is parsed one character at a time, each time a '\' is encountered, the next character is checked. That is why only five show up. Then, the '$' is displayed followed by a space that you can't see (replace the $_$ with $b$). The next '$' indicates the beginning of a variable, so the code starts looking for the ending '$'. When the '/' is encountered, the variable is discarded and the next comment line started.
What is odd, when the back-slash is followed by multiple special characters, only the back-slash will be considered regular text until two other special characters are put together. Then only the first one of the other special characters will be shown in the comments.
See above.
The space character having to be represented by an underscore seems to be an enigma. Maybe Tim can shed some light on this.
It appears that the parser for the SSTOOLS.INI will treat the space character as the delimiter for the end of the COMMENT parameter, instead of looking for a typical line-feed or carriage-return character. So the underscore has to be used to show a space in an actual comment.
What happens is that the command parser sees spaces as breaks between commands. The command parser processes sstools.ini first and before the comment parser even sees the string, it has been truncated at the first space. Also, the command parser sees the '/' first, and only sends the character up to that point to the comment parser. Bottom line is that we can't easily change the code to allow us to put a space or '/' in a comment= line. The problem I was seeing with Xfractint was due to using the command line to enter the comment line instead of using sstools.ini. It works fine when sstools.ini is used. Jonathan