From Richard Hamilton:

Hi Mark,

I just finished chasing down a tricky problem.

By accident, I inserted an extra space in the first paragraph of a .sam file. That is, I created the following:

chapter:(#chapter.partitioning) Partitioning Complexity

    <<<(annotations.sam)

    index:: type, term
        concept, partitioning

     What is complexity in the content process (or any other process)? The complexity of a task can be measure by the number of decisions you have to make and execute. Every decision you …

There are five spaces, instead of four, before the word “What”. I’ve included the error messages below.

I’m surprised that the syntax is that picky, but also, I’m a bit concerned that unlike some of the other error messages I’ve seen, this one doesn’t identify the line in the input file that triggered the error. I needed to do a divide and conquer test to find the offending spot (I kept splitting the file in half until I found the problem).

I played around a bit, and I like that the only concern is consistency (that is, I can make the size of the indent pretty much anything at each level, as long as everything else at the same level has the same indent), but it would be helpful to have better diagnostics for this kind of thing (which is probably pretty common).

Best regards, Richard

P.S. No need to do anything while you’re away; I’ve got things running again, and I’m sure I can diagnose anything similar that occurs, but I wanted you to know about this.

Here is the error message:

SAM parser information: Parsing /Users/hamilton/src/Baker/structuredwritingbook/sam/testpart.sam SAM parser information: Parsing include annotations.sam SAM parser information: Finished parsing include annotations.sam Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 2312, in samParser.parse(inf) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 105, in parse self.stateMachine.run((self.source, None)) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/statemachine.py", line 25, in run (newState, cargo) = handler(cargo) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 189, in _paragraph_start self.doc.add_block(b) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 1275, in add_block self.current_block.add(block) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 560, in add self.parent.add(b) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 755, in add str(self))) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 597, in str return ''.join(self._output_block()) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 606, in _output_block yield str(x) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 597, in str return ''.join(self._output_block()) File "/Users/hamilton/src/Baker/sam/samparser.py", line 777, in _output_block yield " " * int(self.indent + 4) + x[0] + ' = ' + x[1] + "\n" TypeError: Can't convert 'Flow' object to str implicitly

mbakeranalecta / sam

Indent error message bug #144

Here is the error message: