Feature #14574: percent literals and binary encoding strings

• Status: Open
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -

[pb (pumbur _)]

coding "\x00".force_encoding('binary') or ["\x00"].pack('a*') is a hassle, is there a chance to have special percent literal for it?
i.e: %b"\x00" would return binary string. (note, signle-character \x00 there is accidental, the idea is force any string from script encoding to binary)

or, more general suggestion:
allow percent literal with any [a-z] character, move all logic to user-level and allow it to be redefinable:

define_percent_literal(:b){|q| q.force_encoding('binary') }
%b'\x00' #=> "\x00"

[phluid61 (Matthew Kerwin)]

str = "\x00".b #=> "\x00"
str.encoding #=> #<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>

Incidentally, if you care about it:

str = -"...".b
str.frozen? #=> true
str.encoding #=> #<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>

[pb (pumbur _)]

oops. well, that certainly closes first part for me, the one that agitated me to write issue.

there still was cases where i wanted to define other string literals, but i'm not sure its worth it.

sorry for bothering, if no one has thoughts on second part, issue may be closed.

[phluid61 (Matthew Kerwin)]

I think runtime-customisable percent-literal strings are a bit of a hard ask, since things like %w, %r, %x are so tightly integrated with the parser itself.

Even the question of when to stop consuming (nested brackets? escape characters? interpolation??) means there will be messy and confusing edge-cases.

I'm not against the idea per se, I just think it's not workable in the Ruby we have today.

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

"Customizable percent literal" had been proposed as %y, YAML literal.