iwextattr and multi-line attribute values

System

Does anyone know if/what Interwoven products currently or may in the future set extended attributes to multi-line values?

For better performance I would like to run iwextattr once (-l) when I create the object that represents a file rather than once for each extended attribute (-g) that may exist. I imagine I would use everything before the first = in each line as the attribute name and everything after it and before a linefeed as the value of that attribute. I am not sure if I can reliably parse the output of this command when run with -l though as there could be something in Interwoven products (MetaTagger, VisualAnnotate, etc.) that sets extended attributes to values that span multiple lines (I am relatively sure there is nothing in my custom code that sets extended attributes to multi-line values). I guess I could check the next line of the iwextattr output and if it contains an = character I could assume that it is a key=value pair, but this would not handle the case where the second line of a multi-line extended attribute value contains an = character. This may be a relatively remote consideration but I am trying to write generic, reusable code that will work with this and future releases of all Interwoven products, and I actually remember this being a problem on a previous project (I am not sure if it was my code that was setting attributes to multi-line values or if it was MetaTagger or something else).

Any specifics on this issue would be greatly appreciated.