Adding comments to Scaler State dump files (pass 2)

This maybe an interesting tip for some users.
It may be useful to add notes to a saved state file dump, so that at some point in the future you can refer to those notes without any parallel documents.
I can confirm that the Scaler engine (as I expected) processes inbound XML in accordance with the spec, and hence there are two methods for you to edit a state file to embed informative notes.

{A} You can add an annotation. which means you just edit in the following lines. You can then add any comments in between the two ‘documentation’ lines, as long as they are valid XML characters.
scaler a

{B} The second way is more robust, using something called a CDATA section.
This is started by adding such a section which can than be followed by other text, including characters which are now XML valid. {@sj1 just pointed out this should read ‘NOT XML’ - thanks Steve!} To end the comments add a new line with the termination sequence.
The important thing is that the file can be loaded back into Scaler in the normal way, and it will ignore all the comment data. See example in what follows.
scaler b

Either of these produce a valid file

scaler c

You can also search through a folder full of files for these comments to identify and display / print them. Juts might be useful as you work through the 700,000 odd basic progression / performance combinations …

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