What do these characters inside the parentheses of a paremeter expansion (${(…)}) do? - zsh

hi am new to zsh and am trying to create multi-line prompt and came across this line of code:
local pad=${(pl.$pad_len.. .)}
My 1st question is what is the pl inside the parentheses? Is it a command or operator or a flag(s)?
And my 2nd question is what are the dots that follow $pad_len?

Those are Zsh parameter expansion flags.
l.$pad_len. makes the given (in this case, empty) string exactly $pad_len long, either by truncating it from the left or by padding it on the left with spaces.
l.$pad_len.. . does the same as the above, but specifies explicitly to use the space character for padding — which is unnecessary, since the default is to pad with spaces.
The .s here are arbitrary separators used to enclose each argument for the preceding flag. It doesn’t matter which (matching pair of) punctuation characters you use for this, as long they enclose each argument in pairs. So, l:$pad_len:: : and l<$pad_len>< > do the exact same thing.
p makes l support print escape codes in the second argument — which is unnecessary, since we don’t use any here.
So, a shorter way to write this would be
local pad=${(l.$pad_len.)}
If you want to do this operation on a non-empty string, you can either pass the name of a variable
local foo=bar
local pad=${(l.$pad_len.)foo}
or pass a literal string with :-
local pad=${(l.$pad_len.):-bar}

Related

In ruamel how to start a string with '*' with no quotes like any other string

yaml = ruamel.yaml.YAML()
yaml.indent(mapping=4)
test_yaml_file = open("test.yaml")
test_file = yaml.load(test_yaml_file)
# test = LiteralScalarString('*clvm')
test = "*testing"
test_file['test_perf'] = test
with open("test.yaml", 'w') as changed_file:
yaml.dump(test_file, changed_file)
In this the expected output was
test_perf: *testing
but the output has been
test_perf: '*testing'
how to achieve this using ruamel?
Your scalar starts with a *, which is used in YAML to indicate an alias node. To prevent *testing to be interpreted as an alias during loading (even though the corresponding anchor (&testing) is not specified in the document), the scalar must be quoted or represented as a literal or folded block scalar.
So there is no way to prevent the quotes from happening apart from choosing to represent the scalar as literal or folded block scalar (where you don't get the quotes, but do get the | resp. >)
You should not worry about these quotes, because after loading you'll again have the string *testing and not something that all of a sudden has extra (unwanted) quotes).
There are other characters that have special meaning in YAML (&, !, etc.) and when indicated at the beginning of a scalar cause the scalar to be quoted. What the dump routine actually does is dump the string and read it back and if that results in a different value, the dumper knows that quoting is needed. This also works with strings like 2022-01-28, which when read back result in a date, such strings get quoted automatically when dumped as well (same for strings that look like floats, integers, true/false values).

How to process latex commands in R?

I work with knitr() and I wish to transform inline Latex commands like "\label" and "\ref", depending on the output target (Latex or HTML).
In order to do that, I need to (programmatically) generate valid R strings that correctly represent the backslash: for example "\label" should become "\\label". The goal would be to replace all backslashes in a text fragment with double-backslashes.
but it seems that I cannot even read these strings, let alone process them: if I define:
okstr <- function(str) "do something"
then when I call
okstr("\label")
I directly get an error "unrecognized escape sequence"
(of course, as \l is faultly)
So my question is : does anybody know a way to read strings (in R), without using the escaping mechanism ?
Yes, I know I could do it manually, but that's the point: I need to do it programmatically.
There are many questions that are close to this one, and I have spent some time browsing, but I have found none that yields a workable solution for this.
Best regards.
Inside R code, you need to adhere to R’s syntactic conventions. And since \ in strings is used as an escape character, it needs to form a valid escape sequence (and \l isn’t a valid escape sequence in R).
There is simply no way around this.
But if you are reading the string from elsewhere, e.g. using readLines, scan or any of the other file reading functions, you are already getting the correct string, and no handling is necessary.
Alternatively, if you absolutely want to write LaTeX-like commands in literal strings inside R, just use a different character for \; for instance, +. Just make sure that your function correctly handles it everywhere, and that you keep a way of getting a literal + back. Here’s a suggestion:
okstr("+label{1 ++ 2}")
The implementation of okstr then needs to replace single + by \, and double ++ by + (making the above result in \label{1 + 2}). But consider in which order this needs to happen, and how you’d like to treat more complex cases; for instance, what should the following yield: okstr("1 +++label")?

What is meaning of ##*/ in unix?

I found syntax like below.
${VARIABLE##*/}
what is the meaning of ##*/ in this?
I know meaning of */ in ls */ but not aware about what above syntax does.
This example will make it clear:
VARIABLE='abcd/def/123'
echo "${VARIABLE#*/}"
def/123
echo "${VARIABLE##*/}"
123
##*/ is stripping out longest match of anything followed by / from start of input.
#*/ is stripping out shortest match of anything followed by / from start of input.
PS: Using all capital variable names is not considered very good practice in Unix shell. Better to use variable instead of VARIABLE.
From man bash:
${parameter#word}
${parameter##word}
Remove matching prefix pattern. The word is expanded to produce
a pattern just as in pathname expansion. If the pattern matches
the beginning of the value of parameter, then the result of the
expansion is the expanded value of parameter with the shortest
matching pattern (the ``#'' case) or the longest matching pat‐
tern (the ``##'' case) deleted. If parameter is # or *, the
pattern removal operation is applied to each positional parame‐
ter in turn, and the expansion is the resultant list. If param‐
eter is an array variable subscripted with # or *, the pattern
removal operation is applied to each member of the array in
turn, and the expansion is the resultant list.

RegEx for Client-Side Validation of FileUpload

I'm trying to create a RegEx Validator that checks the file extension in the FileUpload input against a list of allowed extensions (which are user specified). The following is as far as I have got, but I'm struggling with the syntax of the backward slash (\) that appears in the file path. Obviously the below is incorrect because it just escapes the (]) which causes an error. I would be really grateful for any help here. There seems to be a lot of examples out there, but none seem to work when I try them.
[a-zA-Z_-s0-9:\]+(.pdf|.PDF)$
To include a backslash in a character class, you need to use a specific escape sequence (\b):
[a-zA-Z_\s0-9:\b]+(\.pdf|\.PDF)$
Note that this might be a bit confusing, because outside of character classes, \b represents a word boundary. I also assumed, that -s was a typo and should have represented a white space. (otherwise it shouldn't compile, I think)
EDIT: You also need to escape the dots. Otherwise they will be meta character for any character but line breaks.
another EDIT: If you actually DO want to allow hyphens in filenames, you need to put the hyphen at the end of the character class. Like this:
[a-zA-Z_\s0-9:\b-]+(\.pdf|\.PDF)$
You probably want to use something like
[a-zA-Z_0-9\s:\\-]+\.[pP][dD][fF]$
which is same as
[\w\s:\\-]+\.[pP][dD][fF]$
because \w = [a-zA-Z0-9_]
Be sure character - to put as very first or very last item in the [...] list, otherwise it has special meaning for range or characters, such as a-z.
Also \ character has to be escaped by another slash, even inside of [...].

Don't want spaces in the text, but this regex is passing not sure why

I am using the following regex
/[a-zA-Z0-9]+/i.test(value)
If I enter a space in the word, it passes.
I don't see where spaces are aloud in the regex, why is it passing?
You need to set the beginning and end bounderies so that the entire string must match the regular expression, otherwise it'll look for any match (which in this case is one or more of the characters specified).
Try this:
/^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$/i.test(value)
Because you haven't anchored it.
For these sorts of tests, it's typically safer to make sure you don't have the negated character class:
/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/

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