brace-expand.lua

Perform Bash-style brace expansion on a string, returning a sequence of all resulting strings. Braces can be nested, and sequence expressions are supported.

USAGE

brace_expand = require 'brace-expand'

s1 = brace_expand.expand("{1!,a } {-2..08..5} {z..x}")

-- The sequence returned above is identical to this one:
s2 = {
    "1! -2 z",   "1! -2 y",   "1! -2 x",
    "1! 03 z",   "1! 03 y",   "1! 03 x",
    "1! 08 z",   "1! 08 y",   "1! 08 x",

    "a  -2 z",   "a  -2 y",   "a  -2 x",
    "a  03 z",   "a  03 y",   "a  03 x",
    "a  08 z",   "a  08 y",   "a  08 x",
}

NOTES

Special characters ({ , . }) can be quoted by preceding then with a backslash. That backslash is currently left in place and not removed from the results. (This may change in the future.)

Only the characters listed above have any special meaning; in particular, spaces and quotes are treated like any other character. (The sequence ${ is not treated differently either.)

Otherwise, this module tries to mimic Bash's behavior as closely as possible. (If I missed something, please let me know!)

AUTHOR

Frédéric Brière (fbriere@fbriere.net)

Licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.

THANKS

Thanks to Stanis Trendelenburg for braceexpand.py, which was tremendously helpful as a starting point (https://github.com/trendels/braceexpand).