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go-ruby-shellwords documentation

Ruby's Shellwords split, escape & join in pure Go — MRI-compatible, no cgo.

go-ruby-shellwords/shellwords is a faithful, pure-Go (zero cgo) reimplementation of Ruby's Shellwords, matching reference Ruby (MRI) byte-for-byte. The module path is github.com/go-ruby-shellwords/shellwords.

It was extracted from rbgo's prelude/internals into a reusable standalone library: the module is standalone and importable by any Go program, and it is the backend bound into go-embedded-ruby by rbgo as a native module — just like go-ruby-regexp and go-ruby-erb. The dependency runs the other way: this library has no dependency on the Ruby runtime.

Status: shellsplit + shellescape + shelljoin complete — MRI byte-exact

Faithful port of Ruby's Shellwords: shellsplit POSIX sh word splitting honouring single quotes, double quotes and backslash escapes, shellescape so a string survives one round of shell parsing (including the empty-string '' case), and shelljoin as the inverse — with shellsplit(shelljoin(words)) == words guaranteed and the same ArgumentError on an unmatched quote. Validated by a differential oracle against the system ruby / shellwords — split, escaped and joined output compared byte-for-byte — at 100% coverage, gofmt + go vet clean, CI green across the six 64-bit Go targets and three OSes.

Quick taste

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"

Repositories

Repo What it is
shellwords the library — Ruby's Shellwords in pure Go
docs this documentation site (MkDocs Material, versioned with mike)
go-ruby-shellwords.github.io the organization landing page (Hugo)
brand logo and brand assets

Principles

  • Pure Go, CGO_ENABLED=0 — trivial cross-compilation, a single static binary, no C toolchain.
  • MRI byte-exact. Output matches reference Ruby exactly, not approximately, validated by a differential oracle against the ruby binary.
  • Standalone & reusable. Extracted from rbgo's internals; no dependency on the Ruby runtime — the dependency runs the other way.
  • 100% test coverage is the target, enforced as a CI gate, across 6 arches and 3 OSes.

Where to go next

  • Why pure Go — why this slice of Ruby is deterministic enough to live as a standalone, interpreter-independent Go library.
  • Usage & API — the public surface and worked examples.
  • Roadmap — what is done and what is downstream by design.

Source lives at github.com/go-ruby-shellwords/shellwords.