DATACLEAN – Fix Common CHAT Formatting Errors

Status: Current

Purpose

Reimplements CLAN’s DataCleanUp command, which fixes spacing and formatting issues in CHAT files. Because these are text-level formatting concerns that operate below the AST level, the AST transform is a no-op; the actual logic operates on serialized CHAT text via clean_chat_text() and the end-to-end run_dataclean() function.

Usage

chatter clan dataclean file.cha

Options

DATACLEAN has no command-specific flags. It accepts a single positional input path plus the optional shared -o/--output from CommonAnalysisArgs (default: stdout). The full set of fixes always runs together; there is no --spacing-only switch — to apply only the text-spacing repairs you would have to pre-filter the input or post-edit the output.

Behavior

The following fixes are applied to non-header lines:

• Missing space before [ brackets
• Missing space after ] brackets
• Tab characters inside lines (converted to spaces)
• Bare ... without + prefix (converted to +...)
• #long converted to ##
• Header lines (@-prefixed) are left untouched

Differences from CLAN

• Operates on serialized text (post-parse) rather than raw input, since these are formatting concerns below the AST level.
• Uses the framework transform pipeline (parse -> transform -> serialize -> text fixups -> write).