Re: Command line globber/tokenizer library for C?

ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan <tednolan>) writes:

In article <87cyl9zx14.fsf@nosuchdomain.example.com>,
Keith Thompson  <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> wrote:

ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan <tednolan>) writes:

In article <vbsmlb$3o6n2$1@raubtier-asyl.eternal-september.org>,
Bonita Montero  <Bonita.Montero@gmail.com> wrote:

Am 11.09.2024 um 16:59 schrieb Kenny McCormack:

In article <vbs1om$3jkch$1@raubtier-asyl.eternal-september.org>,
Bonita Montero  <Bonita.Montero@gmail.com> wrote:

Do you think it would make sense to switch the language ?

>

Do you think it would make sense to pay attention to the "Newsgroups" line
in your header before clicking "Send"?

>
I just wanted to suggest a simpler language.
Compare that with a manual implementation of the same in C.

>
Thanks, I appreciate that, but it does have to be C.

>
We could help you more effectively if we understood your requirements.
>
Why exactly does it have to be C?
>
What system or systems do you need to support?  (I asked this before and
you didn't answer.)
>
If you only care about Windows, for example, that's going to affect what
solutions we can offer; likewise if you only care about POSIX-based
systems, or only about Linux-based systems.
>
It might also be useful to know more about the context.  If this is for
some specific application, what is that application intended to do, and
why does it need to do tokenization and globbing?
>

>
This would be for work, so I am limited in what I can say about it, but
it has to be in C because it is would be a C callout from a GT.M mumps
process.  GT.M stores the command line tail (everything it doesn't need
to get a program running) in the special variable $ZCMDLINE which can
be passed to a callout.  I would like to parse that string as the
shell does a command line.  Basically, if it isn't a C library that
is commonly available through Linux package managers I probably can't
use it.  In the end this is a "nice to have" and I have a q&d approach
that I will probably use.

If it were down to me I'd do the word splitting "by hand" and use POSIX
glob(3) to do the file expansion.

For the word splitting, the key would be to know where these strings
come from and what is really needed.  That would enable you to pick a
syntax that makes sense for your particular use-case.  For example, if
the string are typed by people, I wouldn't use the typical shell
quoting.  I would not want anyone (other than technical Unix users) to
have to type

  'He said "you can'"'""t"

You might get away with a very simple word splitting algorithm.

--
Ben.