Vorbis dev - Sep 2008 - Can Vorbis comment tags be empty ?

Hi,

I've written some code to validate comments passed to libkate,
which happens to use the Vorbis comments format (apart from the
framing bit, which I dumped rather early). While coding this,
I wondered if I should allow empty tags (eg, '=foo').
I had a look at liboggz and vorbiscomment, and they both allow
it (I didn't test vorbiscomment, just looked at the source).
However, vorbiscomment has a comment (eh, eh, er, sorry) that
says there should be at least one valid character. The spec
is unclear about this.

Sorry if this is a bit pedantic :)

Thanks

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 2:55 AM, ogg.k.ogg.k at googlemail.com
<ogg.k.ogg.k at googlemail.com> wrote:
> While coding this,
> I wondered if I should allow empty tags (eg, '=foo').
Nice edge case. I'd treat this as a warning similar to comments
without an '=' field separator. E.g. you could reject new comments of
this form, but should handle them, if not display them, if you find
them in a file.

 -r

I think the consensus is that if the tags are empty, they don't need
to be there at all.  The "at least one character" proposal I suspect
would be to avoid breaking (buggy) third-party applications.
Basically, though, I suspect it's not illegal for them to be empty.

-Ivo

P.S: I also suspect someone will rebut what I just said :)