picocli removes opening and closing quotes that are explicitly passed as an argument

[mshatalov]

Looks like picocli always trims leading and trailing quotes of the arguments, even if they were passed explicitly.

Consider this sample class:

public class Options implements Runnable {
    @Parameters(description = "Search query")
    public String[] query;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Raw arguments");
        for (var a : args) {
            System.out.println(a);
        }
        CommandLine.run(new Options(), args);
    }

    @Override
    public void run() {
        System.out.println("\nParsed arguments");
        for (var q : query) {
            System.out.println(q);
        }
    }
}

Look at these sample arguments and actual result:

$ <cmd> "Exact query string" "\"Exact query string\"" '"Exact query string"' " \"Exact query string\""
Raw arguments
Exact query string
"Exact query string"
"Exact query string"
 "Exact query string"

Parsed arguments
Exact query string
Exact query string
Exact query string
 "Exact query string"

Expected result is that with such configuration raw arguments will all match the parsed arguments.

This becomes important when an app expects parameters where quotes are important, such as search query or search criteria. The workaround for me now is to include a space in the beginning or at the end of the argument, as illustrated in the last argument above.

This looks to be caused by trim() / unquote() implementation:

        private String trim(String value) {
            return unquote(value);
        }

        private String unquote(String value) {
            return value == null
                    ? null
                    : (value.length() > 1 && value.startsWith("\"") && value.endsWith("\""))
                        ? value.substring(1, value.length() - 1)
                        : value;
        }

Is there any historical context why the quotes are removed? Should we consider changing this behavior to pass through any quotes passed by the shell? If this is not desirable for certain reasons, how about an alternative solution with adding boolean raw() default false to Parameters and Option annotations and taking raw into account before trimming?

[remkop]

I will make this configurable in the parser.
The default should probably be to leave the quotes alone, like you requested.

[remkop]

Fixed in master.
This will be in the upcoming 3.7 release.

[remkop]

Picocli 3.7 fixes this issue (and related issue #379 - quoted strings are no longer split by the split regex).

JCommander users may also be interested since apparently this is still an issue in the latest version of JCommander, based on cbeust/jcommander#458
(Related: cbeust/jcommander#153 )