On 10/23/06, A.J.Mechelynck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Mikolaj Machowski wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I understand that escape() was primarily designed to escape strings when
> passing to system functions, but personally I never used that and in
> didn't noticed such use in various scripts but very often it is used to
> escape various charaters in Vim's own regexp matching or passing one
> string to some other Vim command.
>
> Hence is the problem: when escaping ' with escape(), character is
> prepended with \ which doesn't make sense when passing it to other Vim
> command because proper way to escape it in Vim is doubling it with
> another '. Example::
>
> :echo escape('as''df', '''')
escape() is for a double-quoted string, or for the unquoted strings accepted
by some commands. For a single-quoted string you need something else, such as
substitute(substitute(string,"'","''","g"),'^.*$','''\0''')
I realize that you want to provide a solution to a problem and that's
fine, but you don't seem to have understood Mikolaj's
statement/question. He begins with "I understand that escape() was
primarily designed to escape strings when passing to system
functions", so I think he can figure out the solution well enough, and
he's instead asking why escape() hasn't been adopted to other areas of
use, such as escaping for regexes, which is a very common operation,
or passing a string to another Vim command.
Also, why would you ever write substitute(x, '^.*$', '''\0''') instead
of "'" . x . "'"?
nikolai
