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So I'm reading the ex spec and came across the following section under Command Line Parsing in ex:

  1. Otherwise:

    a. If the command was a map, unmap, abbreviate, or unabbreviate command, characters up to the first non-<control>-V-escaped <newline>, <vertical-line>, or double-quote character shall be skipped and be part of the command.

    b. Otherwise, characters up to the first non-<backslash>-escaped <newline>, <vertical-line>, or double-quote character shall be skipped and be part of the command.

    c. If the command was an append, change, or insert command, and the step 12.b. ended at a <vertical-line> character, any subsequent characters, up to the next non-<backslash>-escaped <newline> shall be used as input text to the command.

...

To me, this meant that the command

:i | quit

would insert the word "quit" instead of potentially exiting when I exit text input mode. Is this a bug or am I misreading the spec?

The ex command on my machine is symlinked to vim (version 8.2)

romainl
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TAAPSogeking
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  • I would tend to agree with your interpretation but I would find the described behavior weird. – romainl Jan 21 '24 at 11:19
  • I guess it would be weird considering similar functionality with other apps like here docs. It felt strange to me since I originally expected the command and text to be on the same line. ie having :i here insert the a line containing "here" instead of throwing an error – TAAPSogeking Jan 21 '24 at 21:15

1 Answers1

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After studying the spec, I think i found clarity

Append

  Historically, any text following a <vertical-line> command
  separator after an append, change, or insert command became part
  of the insert text. For example, in the command:

  :g/pattern/append|stuff1




a line containing the text "stuff1" would be appended to each
  line matching pattern.

So it seems pretty clear how the "|" should be handled and it seems like my ex implementation (vim) is buggy. Contrary to my initial thought, the command would still have to be ended with .\n

TAAPSogeking
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