Option to redact garbage or blank strings?

[andrewschultz]

It might be neat to have this. I am working with a programmer who is visually impaired and uses a screen reader. Occasionally Glulx-strings dumps out garbage strings that aren't really helpful.

I suppose glulx-strings could weed out strings with certain control variables. From what I've seen there aren't a lot of false positives.

There aren't a lot of garbage strings, either, but just in case, this might be neat to have.

[jcmf]

I think it might help if I understood a bit better what you're using glulx-strings for. Are you using it to extract strings from games for which you already have the source code?

[andrewschultz]

Well, some of the time, it would be nice.

The thing is, a programmer could just do a regex search to get rid of quotes in the source code.

But one thing I've found really handy for testing is if someone runs glulx-strings on a beta they've been handed. Then they can locate the possible misspellings (while paging through style issues) and let the programmer know, and the programmer doesn't have to run it themselves. In this case, the new set of eyes is more likely to question things, so that's a bit of a help. I don't know if it's enough to make a feature out of it.

So, yes, if we have the source, there are probably other tools with perl or python or whatever, if we have the source ourselves. But having used both, I think glulx-strings would be more convenient for the average user than, well, what I wrote, which is a flat perl script that also doesn't track conditional text well at all.

[jcmf]

Hmm. I could imagine doing something where the user provides both the compiled game and the source code, and glulx-strings shows only the extracted strings that also appear in the provided source. But if testers don't typically have access to source code at all, then maybe that wouldn't be helpful and I shouldn't bother.