etcdctl v3 txn value does not honor %q formatting

[chajath]

etcdctl txn key and value specs are given as:

<KEY> ::= (%q formatted string)
<VALUE> ::= (%q formatted string)

To me, it is not clear what (%q formatted string) exactly mean here. Running the very example given, i.e.

./etcdctl txn <<<'mod("key1") > "0"

put key1 "overwrote-key1"

put key1 "created-key1"
put key2 "some extra key"

'
FAILURE

OK

OK

When I do etcdctl get key1 afterwards I get "created-key1" as a value with quotes intact. Shouldn't the value be created-key1 without the enclosing quotes? Also, it does not seem to honor other standard %q formatting such as \ space escaping.

[heyitsanthony]

The %q formatted strings are only for the <CMP>* part of the txn. Get/Put/Del are derived from the etcdctl get/put/delete command syntax. This is given in the grammar given from the etcdctl documentation: <OP> ::= ((see put, get, del etcdctl command syntax)) "\n".

[chajath]

Ok I might have misunderstood the spec. But it looks like there is no easy way of escaping special characters or including whitespaces without putting quotes around, and when I do put the quotes around the quotes themselves are saved verbatim. Any recommendation around putting values that has spaces in it without putting quotes around?

[heyitsanthony]

Tried it out and even the plain quote handling seems broken. It should probably behave like %q if quotes are given. Will fix and add better testing around it. Thanks for reporting this!

[chajath]

Thanks for looking into this. The only workaround I can think of is to enter stdin mode and supply ^D at the end of the value. So I'd very much like the %q string support, please :)