[Windows] backslash characters are double escaped indiscriminately in field index expressions

[ibhagwan]

• I have read through the manual page (man fzf)
• I have the latest version of fzf
• I have searched through the existing issues

Info

• OS
  • Linux
  • Mac OS X
  • Windows
  • Etc.

Problem / Steps to reproduce

While using fzf as a selector for rg I am unable to find a way to send special regex characters since every backslash is doubled, for example, consider the following command:

Only on Windows

break | fzf --ansi --disabled --bind="change:reload:rg --line-number --column --color=always {q}"

Now say I would like to search for open bracket which is a special regex character, I would need to pass \[ to rg, but typing \[ results in the error:

[Command failed: rg --line-number --column --color=always ^"\\[^"]

The escaping logic isn’t limited to {q}, this also happens with {+}, etc.

Another inconsistency I found is if you wish to pass ^ to rg this way you need double up the carets as it’s a special windows escape character, while this makes sense I believe it can be better handled on fzf’s side to provide consistency with other platforms.

During the porting of fzf-lua for windows I also encountered other windows escaping woes (and I also believe I have the solution) for which I’ll open new issues once I have easy reproduction steps.

[junegunn]

Thanks for the report. I'm not a Windows user so I'm basically clueless on the matter.

The escaping code is here:

fzf/src/terminal_windows.go

Lines 23 to 45 in 2616cbb

	func quoteEntry(entry string) string {
	shell := os.Getenv("SHELL")
	if len(shell) == 0 {
	shell = "cmd"
	}
	if strings.Contains(shell, "cmd") {
	// backslash escaping is done here for applications
	// (see ripgrep test case in terminal_test.go#TestWindowsCommands)
	escaped := strings.Replace(entry, `\`, `\\`, -1)
	escaped = `"` + strings.Replace(escaped, `"`, `\"`, -1) + `"`
	// caret is the escape character for cmd shell
	r, _ := regexp.Compile(`[&|<>()@^%!"]`)
	return r.ReplaceAllStringFunc(escaped, func(match string) string {
	return "^" + match
	})
	} else if strings.Contains(shell, "pwsh") || strings.Contains(shell, "powershell") {
	escaped := strings.Replace(entry, `"`, `\"`, -1)
	return "'" + strings.Replace(escaped, "'", "''", -1) + "'"
	} else {
	return "'" + strings.Replace(entry, "'", "'\\''", -1) + "'"
	}
	}

and it was from #2641.

[ibhagwan]

Thanks for the report. I'm not a Windows user so I'm basically clueless on the matter.

Gotcha, I ain’t a windows expert either (nor do I want to be lol) but I was somehow dragged into making fzf-lua support windows, while doing so I came up with what I believe is the correct escaping sequence for cmd.exe on windows, if this is of interest to you I can share my findings/reasoning/code.

As for this issue, it isn’t high priority as this only affects fzf-lua’s “native” commands (I.e. piping the shell command directly to fzf), the problem isn’t found in the non-native commands as I use a neovim headless wrapper to run the command inside which fixes the escaping with lua code.

[junegunn]

Fixed in 0.51.0.