Re: [RFC/PATCH] pathspec: allow escaped query values

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 2, 2016, 16:10 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqoa7jvag0.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <57505105.2000801@ramsayjones.plus.com>

Ramsay Jones <ramsay@ramsayjones.plus.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> So, at risk of annoying you, let me continue in my ignorance a little
> longer and ask: even if you have to protect all of this 'magic' from
> the shell with '/" quoting, could you not use (nested) quotes to
> protect the <value> part of an <attr>? For example:
>
>     git ls-files ':(attr:whitespace="indent,trail,space",icase)'

That would be workable, I would think. Before attr:VAR=VAL extention, supported pathspec <magic> were only single lowercase-ascii alphabet tokens, so nobody would have used " as a part of magic. So quting with double-quote pair would work.

You'd need to come up with a way to quote a double quote that happens to be a part of VAL somehow, though. I think attribute value is limited to a string with non-whitespace letters; even though the built-in attributes that have defined meaning to the Git itself may not use values with letters beyond [-a-zA-Z0-9,], end users and projects can add arbitrary values within the allowed syntax, so it is not unconceivable that some project may have a custom attribute that lists forbidden characters in a path with

	=== .gitattributes ===
        *.txt forbidden=`"

that tells their documentation cannot have these letters in it, or something like that.