Re: \b character escapes in CLI usage

[Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>]

On 26/02/2025 23:36, brian m. carlson wrote:
> On 2025-02-26 at 07:38:22, Jeff King wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 11:44:33PM +0000, Yaakov Smith wrote:
>>> 
>>> Should "git config" be smarter here and print something other than a
>>> literal backspace to the terminal, like "git fetch" does?
>>
>> So I would say no here, in general.
> 
> I agree this is the right choice in general.  I wonder if we might want
> some sort of human-readable output option that might escape these that
> users could use.  The output might still be machine-readable, but it
> might be easier to parse than the current format, which has some tricky
> edge cases when a config value contains newlines.

We have '-z' to avoid that ambiguity. I agree that having an option to 
provide a human-readable output would be a nice addition.

Best Wishes

Phillip

> We already have precedent for this in core.quotePath and could easily
> use similar logic here.  That format, while using octal, which I find
> ugly and hard to read, does have the pleasant side effect that it works
> correctly with POSIX printf(1) (which I'm sure was intentional), unlike
> hex escapes.