Usage & API

The public API lives at the module root (github.com/go-ruby-shellwords/shellwords). It is Ruby-shaped but Go-idiomatic: Split / Escape / Join mirror Shellwords' shellsplit / shellescape / shelljoin, while the surface follows Go conventions — an explicit error, value types, no global state.

Status: implemented

The library is built and importable as github.com/go-ruby-shellwords/shellwords, bound into rbgo as a native module; see Roadmap.

Install

go get github.com/go-ruby-shellwords/shellwords

Worked example

w, _ := shellwords.Split(`a "b c" d\ e`)    // ["a", "b c", "d e"]
e := shellwords.Escape("a b")               // "a\\ b"
s := shellwords.Join([]string{"a", "b c"})  // "a b\\ c"

Shape

// Split performs POSIX sh word splitting (Shellwords.shellsplit).
func Split(s string) ([]string, error)

// Escape escapes a string so it survives one round of shell parsing
// (Shellwords.shellescape).
func Escape(s string) string

// Join joins words into a single shell-safe command line, the inverse
// of Split (Shellwords.shelljoin).
func Join(words []string) string

MRI conformance

Correctness is defined by reference Ruby. A differential oracle runs a wide corpus through both the system ruby and this library and compares the results byte-for-byte — not approximated from memory. The oracle tests skip themselves where ruby is not on PATH (e.g. the qemu arch lanes), so the cross-arch builds still validate the library.

Relationship to Ruby

go-ruby-shellwords/shellwords is standalone and reusable, and is the backend bound into go-embedded-ruby by rbgo as a native module — the same way go-ruby-regexp and go-ruby-erb are bound. The dependency runs the other way: this library has no dependency on the Ruby runtime.