Support single-string args in launch.json

[weikanglim]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'd like the ability to create a launch.json that prompts the user for the exact args to be passed through to my debugging program. The user types in the args into the prompt, and the args is passed through to the launching program.

For example, if launching go.exe with debugger, I expect the user to be able to type test ./... in the prompt, and the resulting program go.exe test ./... is ran with debugging:

My understanding based on this comment, is that VSCode now allows args to be either a string-array or a string type. However, it is up to the debugging extension to support the newly-added string type.

Desired supported launch.json:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Launch Package",
            "type": "go",
            "request": "launch",
            "mode": "auto",
            "program": "${workspaceFolder}",
            "console": "integratedTerminal",
            "args": "${input:args}"
        }
    ],
    "inputs": [
        {
            "id": "args",
            "type": "promptString",
            "description": "Args for launch package",
        }
      ]
}

Currently, this configuration results in the following error:

Describe the solution you'd like
The string-typed args should be handled to support this scenario.

Describe alternatives you've considered
N/A

Additional context
N/A

[findleyr]

Thanks for the report. This makes sense to me.

[findleyr]

Marking this as HelpWanted as I think it would be reasonable for an external contributor to pick this up.

[weikanglim]

@findleyr I submitted a change for this with tests if anyone on the team would like to take a look. I couldn't find any existing package that provided a shell-like word splitting, ended up implementing one that is consistent with bash / POSIX.

[weikanglim]

Hello @findleyr , hope this finds you well. I double checked my changes and tests today, and I like where it is and hope that a maintainer is able to provide review. Would love to be able to take advantage of this feature in my own work/personal projects.

For context, I tried to implement basic whitespace splitting .split(' '), but then with the need to also interpret whitespace as being part of an argument made it more complicated. Perhaps a simple way would have been to provide backslash+whitespace as an escape mechanism, but I wanted to see if we could just make the args string feel familiar to the user, and ended up implementing bash-like semantics for word parsing. I think the tests do give pretty good coverage but would love any feedback on it.

[gopherbot]

Change https://go.dev/cl/469378 mentions this issue: src/goDebugConfiguration.ts: add support for stringtypedargs``

[weikanglim]

Tested it on nightly today and things work as expected. One of the things I didn't test well was the schema intellisense. It looks like VSCode supports type: ["array", "string"], so we'll want to make a follow-up change to update package.json accordingly. The user gets squiggly lines otherwise when editing launch.json`.

[gopherbot]

Change https://go.dev/cl/495816 mentions this issue: package.json: update launch args schema