From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2023 18:16:15 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: use octal escapes, not hex
Message-ID: <CAPig+cRS=cpV1e4QoSy5uypA+-hECyPe2rEg3scV8LVBfzZ5hA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20230613172927.19019-1-jonathantanmy@google.com>

On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 1:44 PM Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com> wrote:
> Hexadecimal escapes in shell scripts are not portable across shells (in
> particular, "dash" does not support them). Write in the CodingGuidelines
> document that we should be using octal escapes instead.
>
> Signed-off-by: Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com>
> ---
> diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
> @@ -188,6 +188,9 @@ For shell scripts specifically (not exhaustive):
> + - Use octal escape sequences (e.g. "\302\242"), not hexadecimal (e.g.
> +   "\xc2\xa2"), as the latter is not portable.

The shell itself doesn't interpret these sequences, so this
description feels too generic. Perhaps it would make more sense to
cite specific tools for which octal sequences are needed for
portability reasons, such as `printf`, `sed`, `tr`, etc.