davedolan.com

This is a side note to my parser project. I’m using a rich text box to display colorized syntax, and it’s really annoying me now that when I set the .Rtf property with a trailing newline (\par) the .Text property pretends I didn’t put it there. In fact, the .Text property seems to like trimming my text when I set it via the .Rtf proprety, but if I set it directly via the .Text, I don’t get said trimming. Can someone please tell me why this has to be this way? I’ve got the whole syntax editor thing worked out and it highlights according to a mapping I’ve defined for the tokens, and the parser DFA generated by Gold, but when I end the input with a newline character, it truncates it and shovels me back up to the previous line. How is it possible that I’m the first person to run into this? Here’s what happens:

when I put a debug watch on foo… it comes back fully formed having removed the trailing whitespace. “someRTFgoodies…LastWord”;

What?!? How can I work with that?

I’d like to thank Microsoft one more time for assuming they know what I’m trying to do and just doing it for me. You guys really know how to make my life easier.

EDIT: I was looking at the source to the RichTextBox in the Reflector, and I notice that this behavior is caused by the way they’re copying the text as a byte array (to account for various possible methods of character encoding.) and in the Encoding process one of the ‘helpful’ side effects happens to be the trimming of trailing whitespace. The only way I can get around this is to write my own RTF box? Does anyone out there know another way here?

Edit Edit Edit: It has finally occurred to me what to do about this. Since this problem goes away if there is text after the enter key, I just don’t trigger the parsing when enter is pressed. Duh. Thanks for being so patient with me… but STILL it’s silly of the richtextbox to prune my text without asking.