offer a way to escape comma as prove plugin argument separator

[XSven]

I want to develop a prove plugin that needs more flexibility with respect to the arguments passed to the plugin. Especially the comma should at some places be used as is. Currently there exists now way to escape it.

my @args = ();
if ( $name =~ /^(.*?)=(.*)/ ) {
  $name = $1;
  @args = split( /,/, $2 );
}

Do you see any way to implement this? A number of different approaches are described here split on delimiter unless escaped.

[Leont]

I agree with you this is not ideal, but I'm worried about breaking backwards compatibility. I know it's ugly but is it should work reliably.

[XSven]

I would have bet that breaking backwards compatibility would be the killer argument. Of course the way argument splitting is implemented works as long as the arguments do not contain a comma. I would like to pass a JSON one liner to a prove plugin to have flexible way to configure it. One such configuration could be

test_args => {
  my_test    => ['foo', 'bar'],
  other_test => ['baz'],
}

[Leont]

Join you just join on , to get your JSON back?

[XSven]

Sorry I do not get your question. This could be an example configuration in a .proverc configuration file

-PMyPlugin={"test_args":{"my_test":["foo","bar"],"other_test":["baz"]}}