xref: /openbsd-src/usr.bin/vi/docs/internals/quoting (revision d4e7c603042317101df5b56db72417d951eb90f7)

#	$OpenBSD: quoting,v 1.3 2001/01/29 01:58:39 niklas Exp $

#	@(#)quoting	5.5 (Berkeley) 11/12/94

QUOTING IN EX/VI:

There are four escape characters in historic ex/vi:

	\ (backslashes)
	^V
	^Q (assuming it wasn't used for IXON/IXOFF)
	The terminal literal next character.

Vi did not use the lnext character, it always used ^V (or ^Q).
^V and ^Q were equivalent in all cases for vi.

There are four different areas in ex/vi where escaping characters
is interesting:

	1: In vi text input mode.
	2: In vi command mode.
	3: In ex command and text input modes.
	4: In the ex commands themselves.

1: Vi text input mode (a, i, o, :colon commands, etc.):

   The set of characters that users might want to escape are as follows.
   As ^L and ^Z were not special in input mode, they are not listed.

	carriage return (^M)
	escape		(^[)
	autoindents	(^D, 0, ^, ^T)
	erase		(^H)
	word erase	(^W)
	line erase	(^U)
	newline		(^J)		(not historic practice)

   Historic practice was that ^V was the only way to escape any
   of these characters, and that whatever character followed
   the ^V was taken literally, e.g. ^V^V is a single ^V.  I
   don't see any strong reason to make it possible to escape
   ^J, so I'm going to leave that alone.

   One comment regarding the autoindent characters.  In historic
   vi, if you entered "^V0^D" autoindent erasure was still
   triggered, although it wasn't if you entered "0^V^D".  In
   nvi, if you escape either character, autoindent erasure is
   not triggered.

   Abbreviations were not performed if the non-word character
   that triggered the abbreviation was escaped by a ^V.  Input
   maps were not triggered if any part of the map was escaped
   by a ^V.

   The historic vi implementation for the 'r' command requires
   two leading ^V's to replace a character with a literal
   character.  This is obviously a bug, and should be fixed.

2: Vi command mode

   Command maps were not triggered if the second or later
   character of a map was escaped by a ^V.

   The obvious extension is that ^V should keep the next command
   character from being mapped, so you can do ":map x xxx" and
   then enter ^Vx to delete a single character.

3: Ex command and text input modes.

   As ex ran in canonical mode, there was little work that it
   needed to do for quoting.  The notable differences between
   ex and vi are that it was possible to escape a <newline> in
   the ex command and text input modes, and ex used the "literal
   next" character, not control-V/control-Q.

4: The ex commands:

   Ex commands are delimited by '|' or newline characters.
   Within the commands, whitespace characters delimit the
   arguments.  Backslash will generally escape any following
   character.  In the abbreviate, unabbreviate, map and unmap
   commands, control-V escapes the next character, instead.

   This is historic behavior in vi, although there are special
   cases where it's impossible to escape a character, generally
   a whitespace character.

   Escaping characters in file names in ex commands:

	:cd [directory]				(directory)
	:chdir [directory]			(directory)
	:edit [+cmd] [file]			(file)
	:ex [+cmd] [file]			(file)
	:file [file]				(file)
	:next [file ...]			(file ...)
	:read [!cmd | file]			(file)
	:source [file]				(file)
	:write [!cmd | file]			(file)
	:wq [file]				(file)
	:xit [file]				(file)

   Since file names are also subject to word expansion, the
   underlying shell had better be doing the correct backslash
   escaping.  This is NOT historic behavior in vi, making it
   impossible to insert a whitespace, newline or carriage return
   character into a file name.

4: Escaping characters in non-file arguments in ex commands:

	:abbreviate word string			(word, string)
*	:edit [+cmd] [file]			(+cmd)
*	:ex [+cmd] [file]			(+cmd)
	:map word string			(word, string)
*	:set [option ...]			(option)
*	:tag string				(string)
	:unabbreviate word			(word)
	:unmap word				(word)

   These commands use whitespace to delimit their arguments, and use
   ^V to escape those characters.  The exceptions are starred in the
   above list, and are discussed below.

   In general, I intend to treat a ^V in any argument, followed by
   any character, as that literal character.  This will permit
   editing of files name "foo|", for example, by using the string
   "foo\^V|", where the literal next character protects the pipe
   from the ex command parser and the backslash protects it from the
   shell expansion.

   This is backward compatible with historical vi, although there
   were a number of special cases where vi wasn't consistent.

4.1: The edit/ex commands:

   The edit/ex commands are a special case because | symbols may
   occur in the "+cmd" field, for example:

	:edit +10|s/abc/ABC/ file.c

   In addition, the edit and ex commands have historically
   ignored literal next characters in the +cmd string, so that
   the following command won't work.

	:edit +10|s/X/^V / file.c

   I intend to handle the literal next character in edit/ex consistently
   with how it is handled in other commands.

   More fun facts to know and tell:
	The acid test for the ex/edit commands:

		date > file1; date > file2
		vi
		:edit +1|s/./XXX/|w file1| e file2|1 | s/./XXX/|wq

	No version of vi, of which I'm aware, handles it.

4.2: The set command:

   The set command treats ^V's as literal characters, so the
   following command won't work.  Backslashes do work in this
   case, though, so the second version of the command does work.

	set tags=tags_file1^V tags_file2
	set tags=tags_file1\ tags_file2

   I intend to continue permitting backslashes in set commands,
   but to also permit literal next characters to work as well.
   This is backward compatible, but will also make set
   consistent with the other commands.  I think it's unlikely
   to break any historic .exrc's, given that there are probably
   very few files with ^V's in their name.

4.3: The tag command:

   The tag command ignores ^V's and backslashes; there's no way to
   get a space into a tag name.

   I think this is a don't care, and I don't intend to fix it.

5: Regular expressions:

	:global /pattern/ command
	:substitute /pattern/replace/
	:vglobal /pattern/ command

   I intend to treat a backslash in the pattern, followed by the
   delimiter character or a backslash, as that literal character.

   This is historic behavior in vi.  It would get rid of a fairly
   hard-to-explain special case if we could just use the character
   immediately following the backslash in all cases, or, if we
   changed nvi to permit using the literal next character as a
   pattern escape character, but that would probably break historic
   scripts.

   There is an additional escaping issue for regular expressions.
   Within the pattern and replacement, the '|' character did not
   delimit ex commands.  For example, the following is legal.

	:substitute /|/PIPE/|s/P/XXX/

   This is a special case that I will support.

6: Ending anything with an escape character:

   In all of the above rules, an escape character (either ^V or a
   backslash) at the end of an argument or file name is not handled
   specially, but used as a literal character.