unspecified parsing error for escaped quotes

[allenb-epilog]

Hello,

Using the latest gersemi release 0.17.1 installed via pip I get an unspecified parsing error on cmake source files with escaped quotes in a very specific configuration. A minimum reproduction can be made placing the following in a CMakeLists.txt file and running the formatter/checker on it:

set(MY_VAR
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="\"${INSTALL_PREFIX}\""
)

I can work around this for my specific case by moving the "middle" quote to the beginning of the line like so:

set(MY_VAR
"-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=\"${INSTALL_PREFIX}\""
)

[BlankSpruce]

This will be rather difficult to fix because I never implemented proper parsing of so called "unquoted legacy" part of unquoted strings because I thought it won't manifest in practice. I was right for about 5 years now. :)

CMake documentation recommends the approach you present in workaround:

We do not recommend using legacy unquoted arguments in new code. Instead use a Quoted Argument or a Bracket Argument to represent the content.

I'll try my best but it might be that rare case where I acknowledge the bug without further action.

As a side note I've run cmake -P /tmp/foo.cmake with CMake 3.31.2 and the following content of /tmp/foo.cmake:

set(INSTALL_PREFIX "install prefix")

set(MY_VAR1
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="\"${INSTALL_PREFIX}\""
)

set(MY_VAR2
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${INSTALL_PREFIX}"
)

set(MY_VAR3
"-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=\"${INSTALL_PREFIX}\""
)

message(STATUS "My var 1: ${MY_VAR1}")
message(STATUS "My var 2: ${MY_VAR2}")
message(STATUS "My var 3: ${MY_VAR3}")

and it looks like the problematic code (MY_VAR1) produces different output than workaround (MY_VAR3)

$ cmake -P /tmp/foo.cmake
-- My var 1: -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=""install prefix""
-- My var 2: -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="install prefix"
-- My var 3: -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="install prefix"

[allenb-epilog]

I have no issue closing this as my case ended up not needing the additional quotes. Thank you for taking the time to look into the issue!

[BlankSpruce]

I'll weigh it myself whether it's worth fixing that since a lot could change across these 5 years and it might be not as difficult as I anticipate now. Thanks for the report.