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There is a concern that people may be parsing the raw output as there is no structured output from this command. In that case, people will need to adjust their parsing logic.

Rejected Alternatives

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We tried reusing the same string used by --list ("- marked for deletion") but we found the output inconsistent compared to the other fields in --describe.

Topic:testtopic    PartitionCount:1    ReplicationFactor:1    Configs:cleanup.policy=compact,flush.ms=1000    - marked for deletion
    Topic: testtopic    Partition: 0    Leader: none    Replicas: 0    Isr: