Parsing diff --git lines

From: Simon Fraser <smfr@mac.com>
Date: Mar 9, 2008, 01:48 UTC
Message-ID: <F4D3B820-CCF4-4212-BF32-700EFD448143@mac.com>

I'm working on a GUI for git, and I'd like to be able to provide some diff navigation tools. That requires that I can find the file chunks in a diff, and parse out the file names.

However, I don't see a reliable way to identify the two files from a "diff --git" line. Here's a (deliberately pathological) example:

diff --git a/a / b/file with spaces.txt b/a / b/file with spaces.txt

In this case, the repository contains directories called "a " and
" b" and the file names have spaces in.

What would make this possible would be either to always quote
file paths containing spaces, or use a character other than
a space (e.g. a \t) between the two file names.

Thanks
Simon