[mapserver-dev] Quote escaping in mapfile strings

[Daniel Morissette]

Thanks for the pointers. It seems that this would have been in place 
since 5.0, but only for expression strings (strings inside logical 
expressions) and not for static strings.

I guess I'll have a look at what it would take to support this in static 
strings as well, unless one of the lexer experts is a taker?

Daniel

On 11-01-12 04:13 AM, thomas bonfort wrote:
> Yes, it seems Steve has added that very recently, but I haven't tested it yet.
>
> Steve has chosen C style \ escaping and am supportive of this idea. I
> would be -0 on the second escaping technique as to me it seems more
> convoluted and less intuitive: imho taking a burden off windows users
> is fine unless it puts a burden on traditional *nix users.
>
> best regards,
> thomas
>
> On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 09:25, Umberto Nicoletti
> <umberto.nicoletti at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Daniel,
>> I think we are already using the first approach in the mapfile to
>> escape quotes, see maplexer.l lines 534 to 577.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Umberto
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 5:10 AM, Daniel Morissette
>> <dmorissette at mapgears.com>  wrote:
>>> An issue that keeps coming back every once in a while is the lack of a
>>> mechanism to escape quotes (') and double quotes (") inside strings in
>>> mapfiles.
>>>
>>> 6.0 would be a good time to address this in case the fix implies new mapfile
>>> rules or limitations.
>>>
>>> The first step is to decide on the syntax to escape quotes. Can anyone think
>>> of a magic solution to this problem that will make everybody happy?
>>>
>>> Here are a few thoughts:
>>>
>>> 1- An obvious approach could be to use C escaping: \' , \" and \\ ... but
>>> unfortunately that would force the use of double \\ in all windows filename
>>> paths. I realize that one could use "/" on Windows instead but using this
>>> approach could cause unnecessary confusion with beginners and become a FAQ
>>> that comes up more often than the use dummy TEMPLATEs to enable queries in
>>> MapScript.
>>>
>>> 2- Another approach could be to use two double quotes ("") to escape a
>>> double quote, and two single quotes ('') to escape a single quote
>>>
>>> e.g.
>>>   "This string contains ""Double Quotes"""
>>>   'This string contains ''Single Quotes'''
>>>   "You don't need to escape single quotes in this string since it uses double
>>> quotes ("") as delimiter"
>>>   'And the same way "Double Quotes" don't need escaping here'
>>>   "Two ''single quotes'' in this string are not considered an escape sequence
>>> and remain two individual chars'
>>>
>>> /me thinks #2 could work with a minimum of disruption to existing mapfiles,
>>> unless I missed something. We'd need Steve's opinion on how this can be
>>> implemented in the parser.
>>>
>>> Anyone have better suggestions?
>>>
>>> Daniel
>>> --
>>> Daniel Morissette
>>> http://www.mapgears.com/
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-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/