[ruby-talk:18749] Comment support in shellwords.rb

Hi Rubyists.

I propose this little cleanup/improvement of shellwords.rb: the patch
below makes shellwords.rb ignore shell like comments (# ...), which can be
escaped or quoted as the attached test case verifies.

Futhermore, it moves the shellwords method to the String class. "require
'shellwords'; include Shellwords" is not particular clean IMO. Why it's
own module when it is really an advanced version of String#split?

--- /arch/ruby/ruby-1.6.4/lib/shellwords.rb	Mon Jun  4 10:59:56 2001
+++ shellwords.rb	Sun Jul 29 18:02:33 2001
@@ -8,19 +8,17 @@
 #	   or
 #
 #       require 'shellwords'
-#       include Shellwords
-#       words = shellwords(line)
+#       words = line.shellwords

-module Shellwords
-  def shellwords(line)
-    unless line.kind_of?(String)
-      raise ArgumentError, "Argument must be String class object."
-    end
+class String
+  def shellwords
+    line = dup
     line = line.sub(/\A\s+/, '')
     words = []
     while line != ''
       field = ''
       while true
+	line.sub!(/\A\s*#.*$/, '')
 	if line.sub!(/\A"(([^"\\]|\\.)*)"/, '') then #"
 	  snippet = $1
 	  snippet.gsub!(/\\(.)/, '\1')
@@ -33,7 +31,7 @@
 	  raise ArgumentError, "Unmatched single quote: #{line}"
 	elsif line.sub!(/\A\\(.)/, '') then
 	  snippet = $1
-	elsif line.sub!(/\A([^\s\\'"]+)/, '') then #'
+	elsif line.sub!(/\A([^\s\\'"#]+)/, '') then #'
 	  snippet = $1
 	else
 	  line.sub!(/\A\s+/, '')
@@ -45,5 +43,4 @@
     end
     words
   end
-  module_function :shellwords
 end

-- 
Lars Christensen, [e-mail]