ExifTool Forum

[Originally posted by janfri on 2008-08-18 18:05:11-07]

Hello!

In the output of the exiftool comandline-application there is no distinction between the field separator comma and a comma in the value of a list tag. For example


It would be nice if the comma in the value would be escaped for example with a backslash. So the second example would return Keywords: foo, bar\, baz and can be distinguish from the first.

Btw. The output of the commandline-application is very well structured and super simple to parse. Thanks a lot.

Best regards

Jan Friedrich

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2008-08-18 18:17:20-07]

Hi Jan,

You can use the -b option to extract a single specific tag,
then a newline is used to separate different items.
Other than that, you can also write a bit of Perl yourself
to use the exiftool libraries and output the information
in any form you want.

- Phil

[Originally posted by janfri on 2008-08-18 18:46:26-07]

Hello Phil,

thanks a lot for your fast reply. Both of your solutions will work in most cases but for my context it doesn't really help:

I've written a Ruby library which parses the whole output of exiftool for a specific file and encapsulates it into a Ruby object. (You can find it on Rubyforge or Gitorious.org.)

The main point is that all new tags of a new exiftool version are supported immediately without adapting the Ruby code. :-)

Therefore I don't want to parse some tags (Keywords, SupplementalCategories, ...) in a special way and using the -b option isn't practicable.

On the other side I don't want to write an additional piece of code which a user of my library has to install. At the moment he has only to install the exiftool commandline-application and my Ruby lib and it works, even on Windows systems.

Ok, if you don't want to escape the comma how about a commandline option for getting multiple lines of list values? For example


Regards,

Jan

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2008-08-19 18:46:06-07]

Hi Jan,

I try to avoid adding addition options unless I can see no other
recourse.  ExifTool is already too complex, and each additional
option means more documentation to confuse the average user.

Having said that, a -sep option to specify the separator
to use in lists would be perfect for you.  I have had this request
before, so I will weigh the pros and cons of adding a new option.

Give me a while to think about this.

- Phil

[Originally posted by janfri on 2008-08-28 17:55:02-07]

Hi Phil,

thanks a lot for the new -sep option in version 7.41.

Regards
Jan