Boost C++ Libraries: Ticket #850: program_options strips off escaped quotes in some situations

gardnermj@… — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:06:13 GMT

I can confirm this on Linux, and add my vote for it to be fixed as well. My application is a type of search engine, and this behavior breaks phrase searches when the entire query is a phrase.

I believe this behavior is new as of boost 1.33, as I didn't observe it with version 1.32.

component changed; severity set

Daryle Walker — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 12:24:50 GMT

component None → program_options
severity → Problem

type changed

Vladimir Prus — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:19:20 GMT

type Support Requests → Bugs

anonymous — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:19:20 GMT

I notice a similar problem (in a similar application). Not that in order to preserve quotes, I need to add an extra (third) level of quotes. This is in boost 1.34. First example is single quote, double quote. Second example is single quote, double quote, double quote.

$ ./search --query='"a test"'
Query: a test
$ ./search --query='""a test""'
Query: "a test"

attachment set

s.ochsenknecht@… — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:08:51 GMT

attachment → patch_ticket850.txt

patch

cc set

s.ochsenknecht@… — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:12:38 GMT

cc s.ochsenknecht@… added

There is some code which is removing quotes like '"' and if they occur and the begin and at the of the option value. Maybe there is a good reason for this? I don't know (maybe because of config files?).

Anyhow, I attached a patch which removes this code and keeps the value as it come from the command line (expect the quotas which were removed by the shell).

Vladimir Prus — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:09:41 GMT

The code in question dates back to 2004-05-14, and I no longer have any idea why it's here. Let's try to back it out.

status, resolution changed

Vladimir Prus — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:12:12 GMT

status assigned → closed
resolution None → fixed

(In [57519]) Don't strip quotes from values.

Fixes #850. Patch from Sascha Ochsenknecht.

milestone set

Sascha Ochsenknecht — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 12:18:33 GMT

milestone → Boost 1.42.0

status changed; resolution deleted

thomas.jarosch@… — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:00:23 GMT

status closed → reopened
resolution fixed

Hello,

I just updated from boost version 1.39.0 to boost 1.44.0 (on linux) and this change broke the config file parsers.

Imagine a simple config file like this:

WorkDir= "/some/where"

The new code keeps the quotes on the directory name string and so the open() call for the directory fails.

So I could change my code to manually strip the quotes or remove the quotes in the config file (which get generated automatically).

Though there's one case where this won't work as good as before. Imagine a config line like this:

WorkDir = "/some/where "

This can't be express with the changed code as: WorkDir = /some/where

-> It will strip all the spaces, so you can't have config file values ending on spaces anymore.

So the code was broken for the CLI parser but needed for the config file parser (as suspected above...).

Any chance we can restore the behavior for the config file parser only?

Cheers, Thomas

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:29:39 GMT

Hi Vladimir,

Any updates?