Feature Request: Function to quote filenames

Feature Request: Function to quote filenames

[raman]

Feature Request:

Motivated by the  increasing number of filenames that show up with spc,
"'"  and other punctuation characters in their name.

The only helper function Emacs provides today is shell-quote-argument --
which often doesn't do the trick.

As an example: Given the filename:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

(setq f (shell-quote-argument "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"))
returns 
"Alice\\'s\\ Adventures\\ in\\ Wonderland"

 But invocations like 
(shell-command (format "ls %s" f))

 throw an error 

it's never obvious what quoting magic to  use to get all the cases
right.

Would be nice if we had a shell-quote-filename elisp function that did
all of the magic quoting.


-- 

Re: Feature Request: Function to quote filenames

[Andreas Schwab]

raman <raman@google.com> writes:

> As an example: Given the filename:
>
> Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
>
> (setq f (shell-quote-argument "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"))
> returns 
> "Alice\\'s\\ Adventures\\ in\\ Wonderland"
>
>  But invocations like 
> (shell-command (format "ls %s" f))
>
>  throw an error 

Which error does it throw?

ELISP> (shell-command (format "ls %s" (shell-quote-argument "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland")))
2 (#o2, #x2, ?\C-b)

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SUSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
GPG Key fingerprint = 0196 BAD8 1CE9 1970 F4BE  1748 E4D4 88E3 0EEA B9D7
"And now for something completely different."

Re: Feature Request: Function to quote filenames

[Nicolas Richard]

Hi,

raman <raman@google.com> writes:
> (setq f (shell-quote-argument "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"))
> returns 
> "Alice\\'s\\ Adventures\\ in\\ Wonderland"
>
>  But invocations like 
> (shell-command (format "ls %s" f))
>
>  throw an error 

It works for me after saying
    touch "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
in a shell. What error do you get ?

> Would be nice if we had a shell-quote-filename elisp function that did
> all of the magic quoting.

If the aim is to quote for the shell, shell-quote-argument always did
the job for me.

-- 
Nico.

Re: Feature Request: Function to quote filenames

[T.V Raman]

interesting, it worked for me just now -- not sure why I hit an error
when I last tried. I likely did somethign else that messed it up -- --
but in general, I've had trouble with quoting arguments from elisp to
the shell.
-- 

-- 

Re: Feature Request: Function to quote filenames

[Stefan Monnier]

> interesting, it worked for me just now -- not sure why I hit an error
> when I last tried. I likely did somethign else that messed it up -- --
> but in general, I've had trouble with quoting arguments from elisp to
> the shell.

Quoting is tricky business, and it's easy to mess it up. But details
matter, and in most cases the problem is not that shell-quote-argument
doesn't work right, but that it's not called on the right data, or it's
not called at all, or the result is then later massaged incorrectly,
etc...
Once you have a concrete problem case, file a bug report.


        Stefan

Re: Feature Request: Function to quote filenames

[T.V Raman]

Thanks Stefan -- In this instance, I went back and looked in the
buffer on my laptop where I hit the error -- like you said I had used
the result from shell-quote-argument  incorrectly -- had used
"... '%s'" and  the "'%s'" was the cause of the breakage.

Stefan Monnier writes:
 > > interesting, it worked for me just now -- not sure why I hit an error
 > > when I last tried. I likely did somethign else that messed it up -- --
 > > but in general, I've had trouble with quoting arguments from elisp to
 > > the shell.
 > 
 > Quoting is tricky business, and it's easy to mess it up. But details
 > matter, and in most cases the problem is not that shell-quote-argument
 > doesn't work right, but that it's not called on the right data, or it's
 > not called at all, or the result is then later massaged incorrectly,
 > etc...
 > Once you have a concrete problem case, file a bug report.
 > 
 > 
 >         Stefan

-- 

-- 

Re: Feature Request: Function to quote filenames

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: raman <raman@google.com>
> Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2015 08:26:52 -0700
> 
> Motivated by the  increasing number of filenames that show up with spc,
> "'"  and other punctuation characters in their name.
> 
> The only helper function Emacs provides today is shell-quote-argument --
> which often doesn't do the trick.
> 
> As an example: Given the filename:
> 
> Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
> 
> (setq f (shell-quote-argument "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"))
> returns 
> "Alice\\'s\\ Adventures\\ in\\ Wonderland"
> 
>  But invocations like 
> (shell-command (format "ls %s" f))
> 
>  throw an error 

It does?  What error?  I see no error, just a return value meaning
there's no such file.

> it's never obvious what quoting magic to  use to get all the cases
> right.
> 
> Would be nice if we had a shell-quote-filename elisp function that did
> all of the magic quoting.

The magic, if there is one, depends on the application, because only
the application knows the semantics of the file-name argument for the
program to be invoked.  So I don't see how a general-purpose utility
function could solve the problem.  Unless I misunderstand the problem
you have.