TIP #407: The String Representation of Tcl Lists: the Gory Details
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TIP:	407
Title:	The String Representation of Tcl Lists: the Gory Details
Version:	$Revision: 1.7 $
Authors:	Donal K. Fellows <dkf@users.sf.net>
	Kevin Kenny <kennykb@acm.org>
	Don Porter <dgp@users.sf.net>
State:	Draft
Type:	Informative
Vote:	No voting
Created:	Mon Aug 06 00:00:00 UTC 2012
Abstract
This document explains some of the details behind Tcl lists; it is there to expose documentation that was previously only present as comments in Tcl's source code.
String Representation of Lists
The routines [[in tclUtil.c]] implement the conversions of strings to and from Tcl lists. To understand their operation, the rules of parsing and generating the string representation of lists must be known. Here we describe them in one place.
A list is made up of zero or more elements. Any string is a list if it is made up of alternating substrings of element-separating ASCII whitespace and properly formatted elements.
The ASCII characters which can make up the whitespace between list elements are:
    	     TAB
           NEWLINE