Campaign CT slice A2. Pure parser, no UI, nothing wired yet.
Retail's client composes chat lines with the markup already embedded —
Handle_Communication__HearSpeech @0x005712A0 sprintf's it — and the text
element recognises it while appending (UIElement_Text::InqGlyphs @0x00468EA0),
calling TextTagFactory::MakeTag @0x00478480 per marker. A tagged speaker name
arrives as:
<Tell:IIDString:1342177290:Dww>Dww<\Tell> tells you, "hello"
ChatTagMarkup.Parse splits that into spans, consuming the markers: the name
under a tag, the remainder untagged.
The rule that decides where a tag ENDS is the one worth being careful about.
It is the absence of a colon, not the backslash: MakeTag requires a ':' to
succeed, so ANY bracketed text it cannot parse closes the open tag, and the
backslash in retail's own closer (TextTag::BuildEndTag @0x00479190) is
incidental to that. Porting "a closer starts with a backslash" would look
correct on every retail line and then diverge on everything else, so the test
pins all three of <\Tell>, <Tell> and <anything> as closers.
Two details taken from the decomp rather than guessed: only the FIRST colon of
an IIDString payload separates the id from the name, so a name containing a
colon survives intact (ParseStartTag @0x00478910); and an unterminated '<' is
ordinary text, so a player typing "is 3 < 4 really" does not lose the rest of
their sentence.
The parse also upholds the contract CT-A1's draw side enforces — the
concatenated span text always reproduces the visible line, because selection
and hit-testing index into that flat string.
Solution builds clean; full hermetic gate green.
Note for the record: PreparedAssetVerificationCacheTests.BackupRecoveryHashes-
TheBackupEvenWhenTheLiveCacheIsValid failed once during this slice's gate and
then passed isolated, as a class, and on a full-gate rerun. This branch touches
no launcher code, so it is load-sensitive rather than caused here — flagging it
rather than silently re-running, since a test that only fails under parallel
load is worth someone classifying.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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