Issue with Escaping < Character

[horw]

Hello!

I found that there is no way to escape processing the < character. For example, I want to register a Git command like:
git commit --amend --author="igor udot <horw7001@gmail.com>".

Currently, there is no way to do this because < > always require input, but I just want to use it as a static command. If you agree there is an issue like this, I can open an issue and also create a PR to resolve it.

Looking forward to your feedback.

[topher200]

I also want this!

I want to create a snippet like this to copy some Github markdown syntax, but it opens the parameter thingie instead.

[[snippets]]
  description = "copy details summary markdown github gh PR template"
  command = "echo '<details><summary>Summary</summary>\n</details>' | xsel -i"
  output = ""

[horw]

Good example! It will not work with any HTML, XML, or other bracketed content.

[RamiAwar]

Ah interesting! Indeed this would be considered an input variable, this is what you're saying right?

In that case this makes a lot of sense - we need to find a way to escape this. Any ideas?

I quickly tried one approach, but don't love the fact that users have to manually add a backslash everywhere. Don't know if there's a way around that though.

Then we'd remove the backslashes after inserting params as a final 'cleaning' step for the command. Something like:

// Remove escaping backslashes from the parameter content
cleanParam := strings.ReplaceAll(param, `\<`, "<")
cleanParam = strings.ReplaceAll(cleanParam, `\>`, ">")

Would love to accept a PR for this. After we agree on an approach, I'd recommend starting with writing tests that fail with these lt,gt characters so set up the expected behavior there.

Will need modification of SearchForParams and probably evaluateParams which is used to insert the params and finalize the command basically.

[horw]

What do you think about considering double << >>as skip characters?
For example:
echo '<tag>' would be recognized as needing to input the tag,
but for example:
echo '<<tag>>' would be considered as echo '<tag>' without needing to input the tag value.

I think some templates usually handle something like this— for example, Python's f-strings (f'{}') or Jinja templates.
https://peps.python.org/pep-0498/#escape-sequences.

Also, in Go's printf, %% is considered an escape sequence:
%% a literal percent sign; consumes no value
https://pkg.go.dev/fmt.

[RamiAwar]

Hmm, that might interfere with commands that involve the redirect operator in linux commands ex. echo "something" >> out.txt.

I think a backslash is a bit safer. F-string-like syntax is also an option, but maybe more complicated to implement?

[horw]

Great example! For this case, echo "something" >> out.txt, I would say there are no open brackets, so it’s okay. << >> will only work together, and if there are no matching opening and closing brackets, they will not be processed.

[RamiAwar]

Yeaaaah but sketchy 😄 - you might have some command that has opening and closing.

ex. ```
cat <>output.txt
This is a line of text.
Another line of text.
EOF

It's better to stray as far as possible from possibly used operators.

Also don't love the complexity that's going to result from detecting opening/closing pairs - a single character is way easier to deal with (ex. backslash or % or or or).