From: -j b- <jrb562@...>
Date: 2008-05-06T07:46:26+09:00
Subject: Escaped characters from the command-line

I've run into a bit of an issue that I hope you can help with.
I am working on a parser that allows the user to provide a delimiter as
an argument to the script. However, I can not find a way to [elegantly]
handle escaped characters (such as \t and \n).
A simplified example to illustrate:

# Using
s = ARGV.shift
puts ['west', 'side', story'].join(s)

$ ./parse.rb '\t'
=> west\tside\tstory


Now, I can do something like:

s = ARGV.shift
sep = s =~ /^\\(.)/
   when 't'
      "\t"
   when 'n'
      "\n"
   # ...
   else
      s
   end
end

$ ./parse.rb '\t'
=> west   side   story


But I feel that is probably too brittle. I tried Shellwords, but that
didnt seem to help (although I could have been using it incorrectly).
Any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks.
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