LONGTIER – Remove Line Continuation Wrapping

Status: Current

Purpose

Removes physical continuation-line wrapping so each logical tier occupies one line in the output file. The legacy manual describes LONGTIER as removing line wraps on continuation lines so that each main tier and each dependent tier is on one long line.

In CHAT format, long tiers are conventionally wrapped with a newline followed by a tab. LONGTIER folds those continuations back into a single line.

Usage

chatter clan longtier file.cha
chatter clan longtier file.cha -o unwrapped.cha

Behavior

Folds any line starting with a tab character into the preceding tier line, replacing the newline+tab with a single space. The result has one line per tier with no continuation wrapping.

Differences from CLAN

• Manual intent: LONGTIER is below the AST layer; it is about physical line wrapping, not CHAT semantics.
• Operates on raw text rather than partial parsing, making it robust against malformed files that might not parse cleanly.
• Normalizes all newlines to \n (handles \r\n and \r).
• Multiple leading tabs on continuation lines are all consumed.