[c0ldfyr3]

Letter to hlcoders...


Mornin all,

I added a few new cvars to my plugin and duly added them to my config file. So today I noticed a weird problem, it seemed the cfg wasn't being executed when loading - as cvars were all at their default values.

So I exec var/mycfg.cfg in the server console and it ouputs a huge string.

Here's a snippet...

-----------------------------------------------
Unknown command "10"
"some_cvar1" = "0" ( def. "0.0" ) min. 0.000000 max. 1.000000
- The Description.
Unknown command "0"
"some_cvar2" = "1" ( def. "1.0" ) min. 0.000000 max. 1.000000
- Another description
Unknown command "1"
"some_cvar3" = "1" ( def. "1.0" ) min. 0.000000 max. 4.000000
- Description numero 3.
...etc etc the entire contents of the config file.
-----------------------------------------------

Now, to me this looked like a mismatched quote or something so I went looking through the entire thing and I found nothing, nothing at all.
Fast forward a couple of hours and I'm still desperately searching for a reason, and out of desperation I look at another very large config belonging to someone else and notice how it doesn't use Tabs to prettify the cvars and their values. So I do a mass replace of Tab with Space and low and behold, the damn thing works.

Now, just incase I had in-advertantly brought the file size down below my previous thoughts about a mysterious maximum size, I copied the entire contents and pasted them at the bottom of itself, and it still worked.


So, the point of this email I suppose is to ask why Tab causes such a problem in large config files? Remember, all those tabs worked fine up to a character limit...

Thanks,
Jason "c0ldfyr3" Croghan