spaces around = (equals) signs - when does it matter?

[drive55]

In the MS documentation, such as Ref.chm, there are spaces around the = signs in some examples :

;High color 1024 X 768

[Display]

BitsPerPel = 16

Vrefresh = 70

XResolution = 1024

YResolution = 768

... yet when I go to study various winnt.sif files or unattend.txt files, the keys & values are "tight" - no spaces :

[Display]

BitsPerPel=16

Vrefresh=70

XResolution=1024

YResolution=768

yet in another post here where I was searching for some help, there is a mixing of the 2,

where the last 2 entries have spaces, and the preceding 4 entries do not :

[Display]

Xresolution=1024

Yresolution=768

BitsPerPel=32

Vrefresh=60

ConfigureAtLogon = 0

AutoConfirm = 1

So what the heck is it?

It's the classic situation as a noob - when you get an error & things aren't working -

you don't know if it's YOU, or incorrect instruction, or a glitch in the physical machine, or the network, or ....... ?

at the very least - if only we could get the instructions clear !!!

PS - could we even begin to mention the use of " quotes " around certain values in answer files ? when does/doesn't it matter ?

Is there any "guerilla-rule-of-thumb" ? such that ....... "always do such-and-such, at least if you need it, it will work, and if you don't, at least it won't break anything" .... ??

Thanks for any insight to this

.

[Yzöwl]

You could write the file using the most common rules for an initialization file.

This may mean that quoting values, not using trailing or leading whitespace and not having any blank lines would be the best 'rule of thumb'.

In my experience however the file is read by taking each side of the delimiter as name and value after dropping their individual leading and trailing whitespace.

[drive55]

Thanks for pointing me to that wiki, Yzowl - it's very helpful under the "Varying features" section,

and reinforces some of your prefs.

I've used nLite successfully for several years now, configuring very slim builds,

but now I want to understand how it's done under the hood .....

and have been meaning to study some of the elders' posts for quite awhile now ....

gosh, fdv, etc.

.... trying to take it 1 step at a time, and the combination of building/installing an .iso from the hard drive into VirtualBox really saves the time!

my current nLited XPsp3 config installs to usable VBox desktop in 8 minutes on a 2 GHz celeron 2 GB RAM machine,

so now I'm working to understand & use some of the scripting methods to make it change other Registry values that aren't included by default in nLite.