How to correctly process a string with escapes in Go?

I am creating a program, which is processing and calculating sizes of open-source repositories and libraries, and saving the data to database for further analysis.

• I have an input string: github.com/Azure/go-ansiterm v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1.
• Parsed to a format: github.com/\!azure/go-ansiterm v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1
• Then I parse that into a format /home/username/dev/glass/tmp/pkg/mod/github.com/\!azure/go-ansiterm@v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1 which is a valid path in my filesystem, where I've downloaded that particular Go Library.
• After that, I am passing that path to the gocloc -program (https://github.com/hhatto/gocloc)
• And parse the result.

But the issue is, when I am saving that string /home/username/dev/glass/tmp/pkg/mod/github.com/\!azure/go-ansiterm@v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1 into a variable, Go actually adds another escape to the string I am saving so it's actually /home/username/dev/glass/tmp/pkg/mod/github.com/\\!azure/go-ansiterm@v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1 in memory. (fmt.Println - for example removes that)

Problem is, when I am passing that string as an argument to os/exec, which runs gocloc and that path string, it runs command with two escapes - and that's not a valid path.

Is there any way to work around this? One idea for me is to just a create shell script on what I want to do

This is the function, which parses github.com/Azure/go-ansiterm v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1 to a format github.com/\!azure/go-ansiterm v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1 - and after thats saved into a variable, and the variable has one more escapes, than it should have.

func parseUrlToVendorDownloadFormat(input string) string {
	// Split the input string on the first space character
	parts := strings.SplitN(input, " ", 2)
	if len(parts) != 2 {
		return ""
	}

	// Split the package name on the '/' character
	packageNameParts := strings.Split(parts[0], "/")

	// Add the '\!' prefix and lowercase each part of the package name
	for i, part := range packageNameParts {
		if hasUppercase(part) {
			packageNameParts[i] = "\\!" + strings.ToLower(part)
		}
	}

	// Join the modified package name parts with '/' characters
	packageName := strings.Join(packageNameParts, "/")

	return strings.ReplaceAll(packageName+"@"+parts[1], `\\!`, `\!`)
}

After, string is parsed to a format: /home/username/dev/glass/tmp/pkg/mod/github.com/\!azure/go-ansiterm@v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1

that is passed to this function:

// Alternative goCloc - command.
func linesOfCode(dir string) (int, error) {
	// Run the `gocloc` command in the specified directory and get the output
	cmd := exec.Command("gocloc", dir)
	output, err := cmd.Output()
	if err != nil {
		return 0, err
	}

	lines, err := parseTotalLines(string(output))
	if err != nil {
		return 0, err
	}

	return lines, nil
}

Which uses this parse function:

// Parse from the GoCloc response.
func parseTotalLines(input string) (int, error) {
	// Split the input string into lines
	lines := strings.Split(input, "\n")

	// Find the line containing the "TOTAL" row
	var totalLine string
	for _, line := range lines {
		if strings.Contains(line, "TOTAL") {
			totalLine = line
			break
		}
	}

	// If the "TOTAL" line was not found, return an error
	if totalLine == "" {
		return 0, fmt.Errorf("could not find TOTAL line in input")
	}

	// Split the "TOTAL" line into fields
	fields := strings.Fields(totalLine)

	// If the "TOTAL" line doesn't have enough fields, return an error
	if len(fields) < 4 {
		return 0, fmt.Errorf("invalid TOTAL line: not enough fields")
	}

	// Get the fourth field (the code column)
	codeStr := fields[3]

	// Remove any commas from the code column
	codeStr = strings.Replace(codeStr, ",", "", -1)

	// Parse the code column as an integer
	code, err := strconv.Atoi(codeStr)
	if err != nil {
		return 0, err
	}

	return code, nil
}

What I've tried:

• Use gocloc as a library, didn't get it to work.
• Use single quotes instead of escapes, didn't get it to work, but I think there might be something.

One way to get around this, might be to create separate shell script and pass the dir to that as an argument, and get rid of the escapes there, I don't know ...

If you want to observe all the source code: https://github.com/haapjari/glass and more specificly, it's the files https://github.com/haapjari/glass/blob/main/pkg/plugins/goplg/plugin.go and function enrichWithLibraryData() and utils functions, which are here: https://github.com/haapjari/glass/blob/main/pkg/plugins/goplg/utils.go (the examples above)

Any ideas? How to proceed? Thanks in advance!

> I have an input string: github.com/Azure/go-ansiterm v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1.
>
> Parsed to a format: github.com/\!azure/go-ansiterm v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1.

Your parser seems to have error. I would expect Azure to become !azure:

github.com/!azure/go-ansiterm v0.0.0-20210617225240-d185dfc1b5a1.

> Go Modules Reference
>
> To avoid ambiguity when serving from case-insensitive file systems, the $module and $version elements are case-encoded by replacing every uppercase letter with an exclamation mark followed by the corresponding lower-case letter. This allows modules example.com/M and example.com/m to both be stored on disk, since the former is encoded as example.com/!m.