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feature request: support escaping of printed elements #3494
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Oh and just for the records: If I'm not mistaken, e.g. bash's implementation of with the actual work horses being: or: (notice that these are unofficial git mirrors) Maybe Also note, that for such functionality to be useful in the way I propose, it would be crucial that the escaping is done right, so that and arbitrary input string is quoted in a manner so that it can really be safely re-used as input (e.g. in |
man fzf
)Feature Request
This is a companion to #3493, with the difference that here it's about a quoting style for the (selected) output of
fzf
.I would say that
fzf
is quite often used from shells. But there, any meta-characters or other "strange" can easily cause problems.Further, I'd say that often, the elements are pathnames (which may contain everything except for
NUL
).A typical use-case seems to be e.g.:
or:
The
NUL
-delimited versions of these would be:or:
There are three problems here:
NUL
is on the stdout within a command substitution. So either it might be ignored, or it might terminate the string or... whatever. Not using--print0
causes an undesired newline to be added infzf
’s output, which is however anyway stripped because of (1).-m
multiple elements are selected, either because of (2) or, if--print0
is not used, because the separator would again be newline, which would be indistinguishable from newlines in the elements.One workaround in
bash
(only) is something like:together with:
after which
var
may hold e.g.'k'$'\n\n'
respectively (for the
fzf -m
case):(with some sugar for display purposes)
Main problems with that:
a. Works only in
bash
(POSIX’read
doesn't have the-d
and-u
options)b. Using that is rather ugly ^^
So the idea of this feature request would be that
fzf
gets a function similar tols
’--quoting-style=
-option, but specifically for output, so that one could e.g. do something like.Assuming that
shell-escape
is a schema that escapes in such a way that it's re-usable as input to the shell.Of course one could have various quoting styles, e.g. for other shells that are not POSIX compatible. Also, current POSIX doesn't support
$'…'
-style quoting (but the next upcoming issue of POSIX will), so it might make sense to add a style for old POSIX,... or perhaps one forfish
(if that's special in that regard - I don't know).Cheers,
Chris.
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