Bug #17107: Backtick in backtrace is a little bit annoying

• Status: Rejected
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -
• Backport: 2.5: UNKNOWN, 2.6: UNKNOWN, 2.7: UNKNOWN

[ioquatix (Samuel Williams)]

In Ruby exception backtrace (and other places), the method name uses a quoting style of a backtick followed by a text/name followed by an apostrophy.

in `<main>'

The quoting style is not safe, as in, it cannot be relied upon for parsing, because it's easy to inject quotes into the output stream:

e.g.

irb(main):006:0> self.send(:"I'm Great")
Traceback (most recent call last):
        4: from /tmp/64556713-b3a1-40a1-b458-bfed3fec55b2:8:in `<main>'
        3: from <internal:prelude>:20:in `irb'
        2: from /tmp/64556713-b3a1-40a1-b458-bfed3fec55b2:5:in `<main>'
        1: from /tmp/64556713-b3a1-40a1-b458-bfed3fec55b2:6:in `rescue in <main>'
NoMethodError (undefined method `I'm Great' for main:Object)

Note the last line now has ambiguous quoting.

• Should we fix this quoting style?
• Should we remove this quoting style?
• Should we choose some other quoting style?

As a specific point:

• Can we use two apostrophes rather than a backtick/apostrophe? Backticks often have a special meaning (e.g. markdown) which makes it somewhat annoying to copy and paste.

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

• Is duplicate of Bug #13589: unmatched opening backtick / closing quote in NoMethodError: undefined method `name' for {}:Hash added

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

• Status changed from Open to Rejected

See #13589

[sawa (Tsuyoshi Sawada)]

The choice of characters used for quoting is irrelevant to such problem, which will not be solved unless the method name is represented escaped such as in string inspection form.

I do not think it is right to parse the error message. If you want access to the method name, you should use NoMethodError#name.

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

• Has duplicate Feature #16495: Inconsistent quotes in error messages added