Re: `printf %q` but more human readable

[Alex fxmbsw7 Ratchev]

i vote for @M for some side meaning of 'most unquoted style'
should result for abc in same no quotes abc, \34 $'\34' and for abc def
"abc def"
.. dunno ? =)

On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 3:54 PM Alex fxmbsw7 Ratchev <fxmbsw7@gmail.com>
wrote:

> well yes, two things
> 1) gawk is a data processing language
> but yes it should be internal
> bash has it partly
> if array elements contain \34 it ( declare -p ) shows $'..' otherwise its
> double quoted, .. yet i havent seen no quotes usage yet
>
> On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 3:52 PM Alex fxmbsw7 Ratchev <fxmbsw7@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> sounds to me like a [too] big thing to code
>> a tokenizer to internal codes then to output format
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 3:48 PM Peng Yu <pengyu.ut@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 3/14/21, Alex fxmbsw7 Ratchev <fxmbsw7@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > about self coding a solution, i started in gawk, but question: do you
>>> want
>>> > \t and \n be shortened or printed
>>>
>>> I am not sure. That is where the ambiguity comes from. It will depend
>>> on the real usage. If the string's main purpose is to show tab and
>>> newline explicitly, then they should be encoded in an escaped form,
>>> but if the main purpose is not to show them, then they should not be
>>> escaped. But this is context-dependent. So it may need some trial and
>>> error to be sure which choice is the best. Or it may need to
>>> empirically determine which is the case based on the content of the
>>> whole string.
>>>
>>> > and only \34 codes be placed in $' .. '
>>> > otherwise " " otherwise no quotes
>>>
>>> It is more than these three cases. '' is also useful in certain cases.
>>> Also, sometimes, splitting the whole string into segments and use a
>>> different style for each segment may also improve readability.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Regards,
>>> Peng
>>>
>>