frozen-string-literal: true
Manipulates strings like the UNIX Bourne shell
This module manipulates strings according to the word parsing rules of the UNIX Bourne shell.
The shellwords() function was originally a port of shellwords.pl, but modified to conform to the Shell & Utilities volume of the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008, 2016 Edition [1].
Usage
You can use Shellwords to parse a string into a Bourne shell friendly Array.
require 'shellwords' argv = Shellwords.split('three blind "mice"') argv #=> ["three", "blind", "mice"]
Once you’ve required Shellwords, you can use the #split alias String#shellsplit.
argv = "see how they run".shellsplit argv #=> ["see", "how", "they", "run"]
Be careful you don’t leave a quote unmatched.
argv = "they all ran after the farmer's wife".shellsplit #=> ArgumentError: Unmatched double quote: ...
In this case, you might want to use Shellwords.escape, or its alias String#shellescape.
This method will escape the String for you to safely use with a Bourne shell.
argv = Shellwords.escape("special's.txt") argv #=> "special\\'s.txt" system("cat " + argv)
Shellwords also comes with a core extension for Array, Array#shelljoin.
argv = %w{ls -lta lib} system(argv.shelljoin)
You can use this method to create an escaped string out of an array of tokens separated by a space. In this example we used the literal shortcut for Array.new.
Authors
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Wakou Aoyama
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Akinori MUSHA <knu@iDaemons.org>
Contact
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Akinori MUSHA <knu@iDaemons.org> (current maintainer)
Resources
1: IEEE Std 1003.1-2008, 2016 Edition, the Shell & Utilities volume