fzf adding a ^ character on Windows when an @ symbol exists in selected line/field

[amreus]

Checklist

• I have read through the manual page (man fzf)
• I have searched through the existing issues
• For bug reports, I have checked if the bug is reproducible in the latest version of fzf

Output of fzf --version

0.51.0 (260a65b)

OS

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows
• Etc.

Shell

• bash
• zsh
• fish

Problem / Steps to reproduce

Using Windows Terminal:

Command line entered:

>echo one @two three @four five s@ix |fzf  --bind "enter:execute(echo {})+abort"

Result displayed:

"one ^@two three ^@four five s^@ix "

So it appears wherever the is a @ symbol, fzf has added a ^ symbol?

[junegunn]

I recently revised the argument escaping for cmd.exe to fix some of the long-standing problems on Windows.

fzf/src/util/util_windows.go

Lines 111 to 137 in 7bac1a7

	func escapeArg(s string) string {
	b := make([]byte, 0, len(s)+2)
	b = append(b, '"')
	slashes := 0
	for i := 0; i < len(s); i++ {
	c := s[i]
	switch c {
	default:
	slashes = 0
	case '\\':
	slashes++
	case '&', '|', '<', '>', '(', ')', '@', '^', '%', '!':
	b = append(b, '^')
	case '"':
	for ; slashes > 0; slashes-- {
	b = append(b, '\\')
	}
	b = append(b, '\\')
	}
	b = append(b, c)
	}
	for ; slashes > 0; slashes-- {
	b = append(b, '\\')
	}
	b = append(b, '"')
	return string(b)
	}

And it escapes @ with ^. Is this a problem for you?

[junegunn]

Maybe escaping @ is not really required. I'll look into it.

https://ss64.com/nt/syntax-esc.html

[amreus]

I'm using fzf as a front-end for youtube subscriptions - fetching xml and parsing using a Ruby script and displaying the results in fzf. One of the columns is the channel "handle" which start with the @ symbol. I am sending the handle to an executable:

--bind "delete:execute-silent(exec\mark-handle-read.exe {3})"

In this case, the .exe handles any strings passed - no escaping required. I think because fzf already quotes the result on Windows?

On the Windows cmd.exe:

prog.exe ^| tee is the same as prog.exe "|" tee

The example does not pipe - it passes the | as an argument to the program.

[junegunn]

Can you check if the problem is fixed on the latest source? In case you can't build the binary, I'm attaching the one I just built.

fzf.exe.zip

[amreus]

I tried the binary you built - it works, thank you. I had reverted to the previous version for the short term.

Is there a discussion of the need for the escaping? If fzf returns double-quoted strings in Windows, I am not sure why escaping would be needed.