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Re: Quoting and string comparison


From: Jaan Vajakas
Subject: Re: Quoting and string comparison
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 21:25:18 +0100

Stupid me, everything makes sense now.
Thanks for explaining and sorry for the trouble!


2018-02-08 19:56 GMT+01:00 Ilkka Virta <itvirta@iki.fi>:

> On 8.2. 15:05, Jaan Vajakas wrote:
>
>> Hi!
>>
>> I noticed a weird behavior. Is it a bug?
>>
>> Namely, why does
>>
>> echo "$(for f in a b c; do if [[ \"$f\" > b ]]; then echo "$f > b"; else
>> echo "$f <= b"; fi; done)"
>>
>
> If I'm not mistaken, what you're doing is essentially this:
>
> $ for f in '"a"' '"b"' '"c"'; do if [[ $f > b ]]; then echo "$f > b"; else
> echo "$f <= b"; fi; done
>
> i.e., since you added the escaped quotes, you're testing strings with
> quotes against a string without one. The result is very likely to depend on
> your locale.
>
> With LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8", I get:
>
> "a" <= b
> "b" > b
> "c" > b
>
> Here, the first quote is effectively ignored unless it's the only
> difference.
>
>
> With LC_COLLATE=C, I get
>
> "a" <= b
> "b" <= b
> "c" <= b
>
> Here, the comparison stops when the first quote is compared against the
> letter b.
>
>
> I'm not sure what the command substitution is supposed to do here, apart
> from confusing the command. The quotes inside the command substitution are
> independent of the quotes outside of it. I'm not sure if you already know
> this or not, since you only escaped _some_ of them.
>
> I would have expected the same output as one of
>> echo "$(for f in a b c; do if [[ "$f" > b ]]; then echo "$f > b"; else
>> echo
>> "$f <= b"; fi; done)"
>>
>
> Here, there are no quotes in the string to be compared, you've just quoted
> the string on the left-hand side. The quotes are removed as usual before
> the string is compared.
>
> echo "$(for f in a b c; do if [[ '"$f"' > b ]]; then echo "$f > b"; else
>> echo "$f <= b"; fi; done)"
>>
>
> Here, the left-hand side is single-quoted, so the variable is not
> expanded, and the comparison is of a fixed string against another.
>
>
> This happens e.g. on GNU Bash v4.4 (e.g.
>> https://www.tutorialspoint.com/execute_bash_online.php ).
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Jaan
>>
>>
>
> --
> Ilkka Virta / itvirta@iki.fi
>


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