"Karl O. Pinc" <kop@karlpinc.com> writes:
> For the last hunk you'd change around "anything". Write:
> "... it will be truncated to less than NAMEDATALEN characters and
> the bytes of the string which are not printable ASCII characters ...".
> Notice that I have also changed "that" to "which" just above.
> I _think_ this is better English.
No, I'm pretty sure you're mistaken. It's been a long time since
high school English, but the way I think this works is that "that"
introduces a restrictive clause, which narrows the scope of what
you are saying. That is, you say "that" when you want to talk
about only the bytes of the string that aren't ASCII. But "which"
introduces a non-restrictive clause that adds information or
commentary. If you say "bytes of the string which are not ASCII",
you are effectively making a side assertion that no byte of the
string is ASCII. Which is not the meaning you want here.
A smell test that works for native speakers (not sure how helpful
it is for others) is: if the sentence would read well with commas
or parens added before and after the clause, then it's probably
non-restrictive and should use "which". If it looks wrong that way
then it's a restrictive clause and should use "that".
regards, tom lane