[Issue 13480] Input range formatting should not format as "elements"

[via Digitalmars-d-bugs]

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13480

Jakob Ovrum <jakobovrum at gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
           Severity|normal                      |enhancement

--- Comment #2 from Jakob Ovrum <jakobovrum at gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Kenji Hara from comment #1)
> If you want to stop automatic element quoting, you can use "%-(".
> 
> void main()
> {
>     auto ror = ["one", "two", "three"];
>     writefln("%-(%s%| %)", [1, 2, 3]); // 1 2 3
>     writefln("%-(%s%| %)", "abc");     // a b c
>     writefln("%-(%s%|, %)", ror);      // one, two, three
> }
> 
> It's documented in: http://dlang.org/phobos/std_format
> 
> > Inside a compound format specifier, strings and characters are escaped
> > automatically. To avoid this behavior, add '-' flag to "%(".

Thanks, nice to know it's possible to work around.

However, I don't think this flag should need to exist.

If strings were simply not quoted, one could get quoting by doing the much more
intuitive explicit quoting: `%("%s"%|, %)`. Using '-' is just a hack - it has
nothing to do with left-justification and thus the reader has to look it up to
know what it does. We should follow the principle of least surprise here, by
formatting the string as-is unless quoting is added by the user.

(changed severity to enhancement)

--