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Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

#show %time( aaa c)
Sun14/10/2007 23:50:00

Workaround:
#show %time( "aaa c")
Sun 14/10/2007 23:51:36

First one was fine in zMUD.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5187

Taken directly from the zMud help. I should know I wrote some of the examples for it, and documented all the character codes.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

Yeah, I checked that myself, but I thought I'd still mention it, as I reckon the %time() function could be made not to eat spaces, and provide greater zMUD compatibility.

Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2007 6:06 pm

Sorry, but whenever you want to preserve spaces in CMUD you need to use the " quotes. These functions like %time() take a *string* argument, and while CMUD allows you to enter plain text without " quotes as a string, as soon as you start using spaces, they get stripped unless you use quotes. This happens everywhere in CMUD, not just in %time(), so it's just a good idea to start using quotes.

Since a lot of people learn to program the first time using zMUD/CMUD, I think it's important to teach them better programming habits. zMUD did a poor job of this. In a way, zMUD was like the early versions of Internet Explorer which would accept all sorts of bad HTML syntax. Microsoft felt that it was better to try and guess as to what was intended and still try to display the bad web page, rather than reporting an error. This led to some web designers getting lazy about their pages and the HTML standards, and it became quite a mess. It was only with more standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Opera, etc that the situation improved because now web designers actually needed to pay more attention to the standards and proper syntax.

In any other language that I can think of, you *must* enclose strings within some kind of quotes.

Yes, it's a zMUD compatibility issue, and there isn't any way to catch it in the Compatibility Report. But hopefully once someone has learned about it, then they will produce better scripts in the future.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

OK, at least with this one I can fix my scripts in zMUD, so that when I reimport them into CMUD I don't have to re-change them.