[Edbrowse-dev] glob

[Edbrowse-dev] glob

[Karl Dahlke]

By using wordexp, Adam suggests

> "posix shell" or words to that effect and then it becomes fairly clear

Clear? Really? To you and me maybe. Bash does so many crazy things
at the shell ... arithmetic, regexp substitution,
and tries to interpret so many characters as something,
I really don't want to go there.
I should be able to call up a file called $phones/at&t
without having to think about it.
And no idea what a mac or windows user would think of all that complexity.
What I have is generally liked, with no reported problems,
though there may be some hidden bugs and some concerns.
I like the idea of keeping my variable expansion,
perhaps augmented with ${var} or $(var) (makefile style),
and then call glob for the rest.
Glob is the hard part anyways, and the potentially unportable part,
so good to have a library do it.

This expansion can be suspended individually by ``
as in

r ``*
to read in the contents of a file called *

Karl Dahlke

Re: [Edbrowse-dev] glob

[Adam Thompson]

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On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 08:03:09PM -0500, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> By using wordexp, Adam suggests
> 
> > "posix shell" or words to that effect and then it becomes fairly clear
> 
> Clear? Really? To you and me maybe. Bash does so many crazy things
> at the shell ... arithmetic, regexp substitution,
> and tries to interpret so many characters as something,
> I really don't want to go there.
> I should be able to call up a file called $phones/at&t
> without having to think about it.

Ok, a couple of things:
wordexp is posix *not* bash. There's an important difference in that it
doesn't do as many crazy substitutions as bash does.
Also we can switch off the command substitution feature which makes things a
little simpler.

In addition, we need to standardise the escape character I think if we use glob as otherwise we're going to have ` for some things and \ for others, that's just a mess.
If you really want to keep your hand-rolled env var expansion,
then we definitely need the ${var} syntax,
and probably the \ as escape character to work with the glob call.

Cheers,
Adam.

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[Edbrowse-dev] glob

[Karl Dahlke]

I might turn my head around again on this, in that,
I didn't want to think, or be confused,
wondering why I can't read
$phones/at&t
that was my quick example,
but I couldn't type that in at the shell and expect it to work either.
There's something to be said for consistency,
even if it's not the best standard, it's a standard.

My ` escape, I think you're confusing it with the individual excape character,
which it is not, that would still be the backslash.
Rather, ` at the very beginning of a filename
means don't interpret anything in that filename, don't glob,
just leave it be.
I think we may still want that feature, as distinct from \ escape individual characters.

Karl Dahlke

Re: [Edbrowse-dev] glob

[Adam Thompson]

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On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 01:22:29PM -0500, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> I might turn my head around again on this, in that,
> I didn't want to think, or be confused,
> wondering why I can't read
> $phones/at&t
> that was my quick example,
> but I couldn't type that in at the shell and expect it to work either.
> There's something to be said for consistency,
> even if it's not the best standard, it's a standard.

Agreed it's annoying to have to shell escape stuff (particularly some of the
file names I get sent by my Windows using friends),
but at least it's a standard, and I suspect most (all?)
edbrowse users are also command line users.
It'd also be nice to make readline's tab completion produce suitable file
names for this as otherwise that'll get really iritating (at least for
people like me who use readline and tab completion a lot).

> My ` escape, I think you're confusing it with the individual excape character,
> which it is not, that would still be the backslash.
> Rather, ` at the very beginning of a filename
> means don't interpret anything in that filename, don't glob,
> just leave it be.
> I think we may still want that feature, as distinct from \ escape individual characters.

Yeah, I got confused by that. Personally I'd prefer a toggle command,
but I agree we definitely need a way to turn off this feature for really...
interesting... file names.

Cheers,
Adam.

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