File system paths in Meta.parse end up in error on Windows

General Usage
1

Is this to be expected? How should it be handled?

Windows 10:

julia> p = pwd()
"C:\\Users\\adrian\\testapp"

julia> Main, Meta.parse("""joinpath("$p", "src")""")
ERROR: Base.Meta.ParseError("invalid escape sequence")
Stacktrace:
 [1] #parse#1(::Bool, ::Bool, ::Bool, ::Function, ::String, ::Int64) at .\meta.jl:129
 [2] #parse at .\none:0 [inlined]
 [3] #parse#4(::Bool, ::Bool, ::Function, ::String) at .\meta.jl:164
 [4] parse(::String) at .\meta.jl:164
 [5] top-level scope at none:0

macOS:

julia> p = pwd()
"/Users/adrian"

julia> Meta.parse("""joinpath("$p", "src")""")
:(joinpath("/Users/adrian", "src"))
2

That’s annoying indeed, but has an easy fix:

Meta.parse("""joinpath($(repr(p)), "src")""")

repr is pretty handy for such tasks :wink:

1 Like
3

Wow, that’s a cool function! I didn’t know about it. It does fix it, thanks!

4

Unless you are just playing with the parser, you shouldn’t use Meta.parse for this. Just interpolate the expression directly. There’s absolutely no way you can make this generic and safe.

1 Like