Escaping a string when passing through multiple tools

179 points · 10 comments · view on lemmy.world

10 Comments

TootSweet@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 315d (4 replies)

Regexes in bash commands are my nemesis.

NotSteve_@piefed.ca · 14 pts · 315d (3 replies)

Regexes in bash commands are my nemesis.

levzzz@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 315d (2 replies)

Regexes

eager_eagle@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 315d (1 reply)

exes

meekah@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 314d

scott pilgrim?

Ephera@lemmy.ml · 11 pts · 315d (2 replies)

This meme brought to you by me trying to pass a regex from Nix into a TOML, which is certainly not the worst backslash orgy I've seen, but tragic in its own right. Both Nix and TOML have a way to specify raw strings, which do not need escaping. But Nix uses a normal string when passing into TOML, so I do have to escape anyways. 🫠

My regex also contains a double-quote, which was just guesswork as to how many backslashes I need there.

balsoft@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 315d (1 reply)

But Nix uses a normal string when passing into TOML, so I do have to escape anyways

What do you mean by that? You are always able to just use the '' strings instead of the " strings, they are just different syntax for the same underlying type. Or are you just using lib.generators.toINI without any arguments? Maybe try something like this:

toTomlEscapeBackslashes = toINI {
  mkKeyValue = mkKeyValueDefault { mkValueString = x: lib.escape [ ''\'' ] (toString x); } "=";
}

This will escape the values, like this:

nix-repl> :print toTomlEscapeBackslashes { my.regex = ''foo\nbar''; }
[my]
regex=foo\\nbar
Ephera@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 314d

I figured, I'd involuntarily sign up for counter suggestions by posting this. 😅

Using lib.escape is a good idea, thanks.

But yeah, basically I want to configure Alacritty and I'm using the respective home-manager module.
Even more specifically, I want to pass stuff, including a regex, into the settings parameter, which more-or-less just takes the Nix expression that I shove in and then outputs it as TOML on disk.

As for how I would've liked this to work:

But the TOML is templated with "double-quotes", so I do need to escape the regex after all.

I did just try to understand how the Alacritty module does the templating and found this gem:

# TODO: why is this needed? Is there a better way to retain escape sequences?
"substituteInPlace $out --replace-quiet '\\\\' '\\'"

Source

So, that doesn't fill me with a whole lot of confidence. 🙃

But yeah, it's working now without me having to write a whole bunch of backslashes, so that's good enough in my book.

TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org · 10 pts · 315d (1 reply)

Learning C: Random asterisks go

vext01@lemmy.sdf.org · 4 pts · 315d

But sometimes ampersands also!