Re: Consider escaping special characters like 'less' does

From: Joris Valette <joris.valette@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 15, 2017, 21:37 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+o7MD84O5uTOz0xAGmd=xL+Hw8UsVCu5v_HEEeMWvAhSRQCeA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20171015200635.e2u4qkxlz2xwpfov@sigill.intra.peff.net>

2017-10-15 22:06 GMT+02:00 Jeff King <peff@peff.net>:

> Git's diff generation will never do such escaping by default, because it
> means creating a patch that cannot be applied to get back the original
> content.

Indeed this would be a problem. That's where my knowledge of git's source code ends, but in that case, can't the output be discriminated against the command that was executed? Command that outputs an applicable patch -> don't escape Command that outputs a diff to see changes -> escape

Show 21 quoted lines

> There _are_ already options to create diffs that cannot be applied, like
> --textconv. So it would be possible to add a similar option for
> escaping. But I don't think we really need or want a separate option,
> when you can already do one of:
>
>   1. If your files have special binary characters that are hard to see,
>      you can use the existing textconv system to do whatever escaping
>      you like. And then the Git will diff the result of the escaping,
>      which means you get readable diffs when they change.
>
>   2. Put the raw output of git's diff through a filter that escapes. We
>      already do this most of the time by piping through less. The most
>      noticeable exception is "add --patch". There you can set up a
>      program to filter as well. There's more information in a recent
>      thread here:
>
>        https://public-inbox.org/git/20171012184736.rglkbyryauwuvn2a@sigill.intra.peff.net/
>
> It doesn't seem out of the question to me to have an out-of-the-box
> default for interactive.diffFilter which does some basic escaping (we
> could even implement it inside the perl script for efficiency).

Yes I read this thread, but I was left unsatisfied because I would like something out-of-the-box. Your suggestion might be the best solution then: implement some default escaping for interactive.diffFilter.

Joris