Subject: Re: [Question] git cat-file --batch cannot handle irregular path

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2021 21:23:31 -0700

"[email-masked]" <[email-masked]> writes:

> but it is irregular, such as "法律\(Law\)/民法\(civil\ law$'\n'\)\",
> ...
> d071ea971fb93ebc937517736c2a63d64ddbe0d9:法律(Law)/民法(civil law)
> d071ea971fb93ebc937517736c2a63d64ddbe0d9:法律(Law)/民法(civil law) missing

I may be misreading what you wrote, but if you mean that there is a
LF in the pathname, I do not think cat-file --batch is prepared to
handle it; as we can see in builtin/cat-cile.c:

static int batch_objects(struct batch_options *opt)
{
	...
	while (strbuf_getline(&input, stdin) != EOF) {
		if (data.split_on_whitespace) {
		...
		}

		batch_one_object(input.buf, &output, opt, &data);
	}

it always treats what strbuf_getline() returns as a single record.

If properly designed, it would have

 - supported "-z" to take NUL-delimited input, and

 - when "-z" is not in effect, after reading a single line of input,
   we would have called quote API to un-cquote the string, so that
   we can express LF and other special characters in the pathname.

but those who worked on "cat-file --batch" didn't.