Re: bash aesthetics question: special characters in reg exp in [[ ... =~~ ... ]]

On 2024-07-22, Kenny McCormack <gazelle@shell.xmission.com> wrote:

The problem is that if the above is in a function, when you list out the
function with "type funName", the \n has already been digested and
converted to a hard newline.  This makes the listing look strange.  I'd
rather see "\n".

I see what you mean:

$ test() {  [[ "$f" =~ foo[^$'\n']*bar ]] && echo "foo bar" ; }
$ set | grep -A 4 '^test'
test ()
{
    [[ "$f" =~ foo[^'
']*bar ]] && echo "foo bar"
}

Is there any way to get this?

Patch Bash so that when it's listing code, any items that need '...'
quoting and that contain control characters are printed as $'...'
syntax with escape sequences.

Someone who had their original code as '
' will might not want that. It has to be an option.

If Bash stored a bit in the code indicating "this word was produced
using $ syntax", then it could be recovered accordingly.

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