Re: lynx-dev Escaping URLs on the command line?

[Thomas Dickey]

> 
> For the program I'm writing (to make Lynx the default browser in OS 
> X), I need to escape URLs when I pass them to Lynx on the command 
> line.
> 
> I need to know how much escaping is necessary -- too much might make 
> an escape character look like a literal to Lynx, and too little will 
> fail in the shell.
> And "the shell" may be a problem too; do different shells (bash, 
> tcsh, ksh) use different sets of "interpretable" characters? Is it 
> possible to have an escaping routine that will work with any shell? 
> What list of characters should I escape, and is backslash-escaping 
> sufficient (a singlequote may appear in a URL, according to RFC 2396)?
> 
> Has anyone worked this out already?

lynx does this internally (to invoke external programs).  most cases can
be handled by using single quotes around the whole string, and a backslash
before a single quote, e.g.,

        'this isn\'t a sentence'

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden> <address@hidden>
http://dickey.his.com
ftp://dickey.his.com

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