Patterns with escaped characters are incorrectly handled on Windows

[yortus]

Problem

The node-glob README states (under the Windows heading):

Back-slashes will always be interpreted as escape characters, not path separators

However minimatchs implementation includes the following:

// windows support: need to use /, not \
  if (path.sep !== '/') {
    pattern = pattern.split(path.sep).join('/')
  }

On Windows (where path.sep is \), this code means all escape characters are treated as path separators. Therefore since minimatch does not treat \ as an escape character on Windows, then neither does node-glob, despite what its REAMDE says.

The impact is that on Windows platforms, escape characters in glob patterns will not work as intended.

This is an issue for cross-platform projects using this node-glob for globbing support.

Example

Suppose I want to match javascript files whose names start with [ and end with ].

A glob pattern for this, which requires escape characters, might be as follows:
\[*\].js

On Linux, minimatch converts the above pattern into the following Regex:
/^(?:(?=.)\[[^/]*?\]\.js)$/

On Windows, the regex created by minimatch is:
/^(?:\/(?=.)\[(?!\.)(?=.)[^/]*?\/\]\.js)$/

This latter regex does not match the specified glob pattern.

Solutions?

Arguably this is a minimatch issue, but minimatch's README makes no particular claims about Windows support or handling, whereas node-glob does make the above claim.

Possible solution in node-glob (leaving minimatch unaffected):

• amend the node-glob README to state that escaped characters are not supported on Windows.

Possible solution in minimatch (leaving node-glob unaffected):

• amend the minimatch README to require the same thing node-glob requires on Windows (ie: 'You must use forward-slashes only in glob expressions. Back-slashes will always be interpreted as escape characters, not path separators.')
• remove the minimatchcode (snippet shown above) that turns \s into / on Windows.
• --or-- add a minimatch option to explicitly specify the character to treat as the path separator.

[yortus]

Related: isaacs/minimatch#64

[erikkemperman]

@isaacs This inconsistency between node-glob and minimatch on Windows is quite annoying... Escaping seems impossible in minimatch currently.

People have submitted issues about it for some time, and there's a PR that seems eminently reasonable.

Although having said that, I personally would probably prefer a major bump in minimatch adopting the same attitude as node-glob (forward slashes as path separators, backslashes as escape char, on all platforms).

Anyway, this has been going on for a while now. I don't mean to sound impatient, but is there anything that can be done to move this forward? Or do you not agree this is a problem?

[isaacs]

This has been handled in both minimatch and glob now. Patterns must use / unless windowsPathsNoEscape is set, in which case \ is only a path separator and not an escape character.