Pull up revisions 1.6-1.7 (requested by martin in ticket #1254).

-fix a condition so that fparseln() doesn't report spurious empty lines
eg after 2 comment lines, or on EOF after a single comment line
-no escape character means no escaped characters

modify the previous fix so that no pointless realloc()s are done in
the case of multiple empty continuation lines, and comment the code
to make the logics obvious
fix an unrelated comment

(jdc)