Feature #4935: Quoted Label Form for 1.9 Hashes

• Status: Closed
• Priority: Normal
• Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
• Target version: 2.6

[adgar (Michael Edgar)]

As discussed in the "Shorthand Hash Syntax for Strings" thread/feature request, several (including Matz) expressed interest in a parallel quoted form for the 1.9 label syntax:

{ foo: bar }
{ 'only-19': true }

x = "hello"
{ "#{x}-world": Date.now }

This personally has come up for me with the new syntax: especially when dealing with command-line options, which often use hyphens, the quoted symbol form is necessary. Not being able to use the new syntax results in funny-looking hashes:

{ foo: bar, baz: qux, :'abc-def' => 1 }

I've attached a patch implementing this change. It allows a colon to follow single-quoted or double-quoted string literals to form a symbol key much like the label syntax introduced in 1.9. The examples listed at the start of this post all work fine. It introduces a new token - tLABEL_END - which replaces tSTRING_END when closing a symbol-label-literal. It introduces a single new grammar production for assoc, which is nearly purely syntactic sugar for the dsym grammar production; I've extracted dsym's implementation to a separate helper function, which is called from the dsym production and from the new label-style production.

I will immediately attach a new passing test for test_hash.rb in a followup post, once this has a feature # and ruby-core thread assigned to it.

NB: By removing the quote check on line 6580, one can make this feature work with any string literal (like "{ %q/foo-bar/: baz}", obviously doesn't work with heredocs) - I personally find this to be silly and inconsistent with the existing symbol syntax. Though it was fun to play with for a bit.

[adgar (Michael Edgar)]

• File label_test.diff label_test.diff added

Sorry, meant to list this as a feature. Test attached.

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Tracker changed from Bug to Feature

[adgar (Michael Edgar)]

With the feature freeze coming up in a couple days, is there a chance this sees 1.9.3? It doesn't break any old syntax, only introduces new syntax, and rounds out the label feature of the 1.9 branch nicely.

[mame (Yusuke Endoh)]

• Status changed from Open to Assigned
• Assignee set to matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)

[mame (Yusuke Endoh)]

• Target version set to 2.6

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

• Status changed from Assigned to Closed

Applied in changeset r47649.

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parse.y: quoted ID key

• parse.y (assoc): allow quoted ID as a key of a hash literal. [Feature #4276]