Feature #11529
Updated by nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada) over 8 years ago
The ruby syntax provides for declaring literals by using the % escapes: - %q(foo) => 'foo' - %Q(foo) => "foo" - %w(foo bar) => ['foo', 'bar'] - %i(foo bar) => [:foo, :bar] It should be possible to define new % escapes. *Use cases:* I currently use: %q{select foo from bar} to quote my sql statements. It would improve readability to spell that: %sql{select foo from bar} (with %sql being an alias of %q [see parsing problems below]) But there could be more interesting uses: %hash[ a 1 b 2] %triples[ a b c 1 2 3] %json/{"foo":"bar", "zip":"zap"}/ %octal_data[012 345 677] and the extension code would be something like def %hash(s) return ... end Notes: - I did expect this to be a problem. But it's not. - in my faint memory, old ruby versions were rumoured to parse `%sqfooq %sqfooq => "foo"` "foo" but this is no longer true: `%sqfooq %sqfooq => SyntaxError: (eval):2: unknown type of %string` %string - the characters used for enclosing should be clearly defined - we have two classes: - -- paired chars like `() () [] {} <>` - <> -- quoting chars like `' ' " / @ _ # $ %` % My Suggestion: - the quoting chars should be deprecated (try this: `%Q%%%%`) %Q%%%%) - the set of paired chars should be extended to include selected pairs from unicode math symbols - unicode does not yet define a plane for open-close-brackets - see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13535172/list-of-all-unicodes-open-close-brackets