On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 04:18:18PM +0300, Philip Ganchev wrote: > On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 1:47 AM, Robert Shinka <k...@unknownlayer.net> wrote: > > On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 09:20:21PM +0200, Jan Kanis wrote: > > >> Bash treats command substitution and variable expansion as a list of > >> whitespace separated tokens. It also includes escapes to treat both as a > >> single token, in case you don't want the default behaviour. > >> > >> Fish does the same for variables, except it doesn't split the contents > >> when > >> the variable is used, but it stores the tokens in a structured way as an > >> array. Command substitution works a bit differently. Maintaining a > >> structured > >> form of data like with variables isn't possible because it is output from > >> arbitrary commands, so fish splits the command output like bash does, but > >> only > >> on newlines. However fish doesn't provide a way to prevent the splitting. > > > > If fish reconstructed "$var" the same way it split it (with \n), then > > your problem wouldn't exist. You could work with lines as usual with > > $var, and "$var" would produce the exact data it was created with. > > If anyone needed a space-separated version of the string for whatever > > reason, they could trivially do so with echo or tr, but I think that's a > > rare case. Right now, there's no reasonable utility. > > Yes, that would be more logical. But separating with spaces saves > screen space when printing the array, which is quite a common > operation.
I'm only proposing changing the semantics of "$var", while $var would be unchanged, so the common case of (echo $var) would format as usual, separated with spaces, but (echo "$var") would print the original string, including any embedded newlines. eg., > set var (echo 1\n2\n3) > echo $var # echo '1' '2' '3' 1 2 3 > echo "$var" # echo '1\n2\n3' 1 2 3 Is there a compelling reason not to make this change? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA Learn about the latest advances in developing for the BlackBerry® mobile platform with sessions, labs & more. See new tools and technologies. Register for BlackBerry® DevCon today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-devcon-copy1 _______________________________________________ Fish-users mailing list Fish-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users
