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 POSIX / SUSv3 (IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 [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 ::escape, or it's 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'll use the literal shortcut for Array.new.
Authors
-
Wakou Aoyama
-
Akinori MUSHA <knu@iDaemons.org>
Contact
-
Akinori MUSHA <knu@iDaemons.org> (current maintainer)