[IPython-dev] Another filename completion defect on win32 - parens

[Fernando Perez]

Ville Vainio wrote:
> It sucks to be the bearer of bad win32 news again ;-).
> 
> In the latest release candidate, completion of spaces works ok. 
> Completion of parens, OTOH, doesn't.

[snip]

> The completion esacping hack that was done to spaces should probably be 
> done to parens too.

Good god!  I'm honestly not sure I have the stomach to write all the necessary 
escaping code for correctly handling '()[] ' characters uniformly in 
filenames, with completions.  I'll gladly accept a patch.

I know this reply sucks, but I'm too swamped now with work and other things, 
and I'd like to at least put officially 0.6.1 out, even if the tab-completion 
is not perfect.  To be honest, filenames with such characters are a pain to 
handle even in unix with 'good' shells (bash/tcsh), since you can't for 
example use highlight/middle-button-paste on them.  You must either wrap them 
in "" or manually escape all those special chars.  That's why I just think 
they don't belong in filenames to begin with :)

If you think you have the patience to code this robustly for all the legal 
characters which require escaping, I'll obviously accept a patch.  But right 
now it's a bit more than I'm willing to tackle myself: the effort/benefit 
ratio just isn't there.  I have very little time for ipython, and I really 
want to write the multithreaded version so people can use ipython with 
matplotlib and other WxPython/GTK apps.

It might not be a bad idea to file your last email on the bug tracker so we 
don't lose track of this in the future, if neither of us gets to do it now.  I 
_do_ think it's important, I just can't do it now myself.

Cheers,

f