Re: confused by the wierd "q" option of "string.format".

[Ross Berteig <Ross@...>]

At 04:54 PM 7/7/2011, David Manura wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Ross Berteig
><Ross@cheshireeng.com> wrote:
>>    C:...>lua -e "print(string.format('%q','abc\a'))"
>>    "abc"
>> It may or may not have emitted the \007 represented by the \a,
>but if so it
>> was visually lost (and it didn't even go 'ding' [...]
>....
>OTOH,
>
>  $ cat -A test.lua
>  print((('abc^H^H^H123'):gsub('[^a-z]', '')))$

Cute.

As a programmer, I'm somewhat allergic to putting naked control
characters in string literals. The backslash escapes exist
because I'm not alone in that allergy. The %q format character is
valuable because it can turn any string content into source text
that recreates that string. The difficulty I have with it is that
it does so by making the least number of transformations that it
can at the possible cost of legibility to a human reader.

I'm just advocating gently for the ability to choose a stronger
mapping that is slightly more friendly to my use case. I'm not
necessarily advocating that the behavior of %q itself be changed
because there are times where getting the long lines broken in
the output would be preferred to deliberately folding them onto
one line.


Ross Berteig                               Ross@CheshireEng.com
Cheshire Engineering Corp.           http://www.CheshireEng.com/