.gitattributes cannot represent a grammar name containing spaces

[octogonz]

Preliminary Steps

Please confirm you have...

• reviewed How Linguist Works,
• reviewed the Troubleshooting docs,
• considered implementing an override,
• verified an issue has not already been logged for your issue (linguist issues).

Problem Description

I can specify a line like this in my .gitattributes file, and it works fine:

*.json            linguist-language=JSON5

But If I try to use a grammar name that contains spaces, it does NOT work:

*.json            linguist-language=JSON with Comments

The reason is that .gitattributes lines are a sequence of value pairs that are delimited by spaces. I examined Git's parser, and as far as I can tell, it actually provides no way to escape the value part of a name=value pair.

I also found an old Linguist FAQ document which suggests to put dashes instead of spaces, but that does NOT work either:

*.json            linguist-language=JSON-with-Comments

Substituting hyphens for spaces seems like a pretty good solution. Should we implement that? If so, where's the code?

Last modified on:

2019-04-15

[lildude]

I also found an old Linguist FAQ document which suggests to put dashes instead of spaces, but that does NOT work either:

It certainly does 😁

Even a copy of your rush.json file (ignore the typo 😊) does - https://github.com/lildude/super-potato/blob/master/ruah.json

The problem you're hitting is a known limitation with the way GitHub caches the blobs: the cache, and thus syntax highlighting, isn't refreshed when you make changes to the .gitattributes. A file affected by a language override needs to be modified too.

[octogonz]

Thank you very much @lildude ! I confirmed that the problem was the GitHub cache issue. After touching the file, the highlighting is now working properly.

I will close this issue. It would be helpful to document the .gitattributes syntax somewhere -- if I had confidence that my syntax was correct, then I would have tried harder to get it working before opening this issue. Unfortunately the linguist FAQ is apparently no longer published.

[lildude]

It would be helpful to document the .gitattributes syntax somewhere -- if I had confidence that my syntax was correct, then I would have tried harder to get it working before opening this issue.

Yeah, good idea. I think we can add it to https://github.com/github/linguist#using-gitattributes.

As for the FAQ... it's not yet been published 😉. #4271 is the PR (/me nudges @pchaigno)