doc/filters: re-edit notes on filtergraph escaping

State the escaping rules more explicitly, reword various sentences and
drop confusing quoting example.

Should fix trac issue #3334.
This commit is contained in:
Stefano Sabatini 2014-01-24 11:31:25 +01:00
parent 599e629f88
commit 68c5ba1f05
1 changed files with 25 additions and 29 deletions

View File

@ -217,29 +217,45 @@ Follows a BNF description for the filtergraph syntax:
@section Notes on filtergraph escaping
Some filter arguments require the use of special characters, typically
@code{:} to separate key=value pairs in a named options list. In this
case the user should perform a first level escaping when specifying
the filter arguments. For example, consider the following literal
string to be embedded in the @ref{drawtext} filter arguments:
Filtergraph description composition entails several levels of
escaping. See @ref{quoting_and_escaping,,the "Quoting and escaping"
section in the ffmpeg-utils(1) manual,ffmpeg-utils} for more
information about the employed escaping procedure.
A first level escaping affects the content of each filter option
value, which may contain the special character @code{:} used to
separate values, or one of the escaping characters @code{\'}.
A second level escaping affects the whole filter description, which
may contain the escaping characters @code{\'} or the special
characters @code{[],;} used by the filtergraph description.
Finally, when you specify a filtergraph on a shell commandline, you
need to perform a third level escaping for the shell special
characters contained within it.
For example, consider the following string to be embedded in
the @ref{drawtext} filter description @option{text} value:
@example
this is a 'string': may contain one, or more, special characters
@end example
Since @code{:} is special for the filter arguments syntax, it needs to
be escaped, so you get:
This string contains the @code{'} special escaping character, and the
@code{:} special character, so it needs to be escaped in this way:
@example
text=this is a \'string\'\: may contain one, or more, special characters
@end example
A second level of escaping is required when embedding the filter
arguments in a filtergraph description, in order to escape all the
description in a filtergraph description, in order to escape all the
filtergraph special characters. Thus the example above becomes:
@example
drawtext=text=this is a \\\'string\\\'\\: may contain one\, or more\, special characters
@end example
(note that in addition to the @code{\'} escaping special characters,
also @code{,} needs to be escaped).
Finally an additional level of escaping may be needed when writing the
Finally an additional level of escaping is needed when writing the
filtergraph description in a shell command, which depends on the
escaping rules of the adopted shell. For example, assuming that
@code{\} is special and needs to be escaped with another @code{\}, the
@ -248,26 +264,6 @@ previous string will finally result in:
-vf "drawtext=text=this is a \\\\\\'string\\\\\\'\\\\: may contain one\\, or more\\, special characters"
@end example
Sometimes, it might be more convenient to employ quoting in place of
escaping. For example the string:
@example
Caesar: tu quoque, Brute, fili mi
@end example
Can be quoted in the filter arguments as:
@example
text='Caesar: tu quoque, Brute, fili mi'
@end example
And finally inserted in a filtergraph like:
@example
drawtext=text=\'Caesar: tu quoque\, Brute\, fili mi\'
@end example
See the ``Quoting and escaping'' section in the ffmpeg-utils manual
for more information about the escaping and quoting rules adopted by
FFmpeg.
@chapter Timeline editing
Some filters support a generic @option{enable} option. For the filters