Why restrict on single character delimiter (in non regex mode)

[passcod]

(apologies for edit, fat thumbs)

While cut doesn't support it, I don't see why multichar delimiters should not be allowed; yes it's available with regex (but needs escaping sometimes) but why have the restriction in the first place?

It doesn't even really matter for cut compat, given that as cut doesn't support them, all it would do is not error for cut-invalid values — presumably not something a script would rely on

[passcod]

Oh and sorry if this was changed in 0.3 too!

[sstadick]

You can! I'll add a section in the README about it.

# with string literal
❯ printf 'this$;$is$;$a$;$test\na$;$b$;$3$;$four\n' > test.txt
❯ hck -Ld'$;$' -f3,4 ./test.txt
a       test
3       four
# with an interesting regex
❯ printf 'this123__is456--a789-test\na129_-b849-_3109_-four\n' > test.txt
❯ hck -d'\d{3}[-_]+' -f3,4 ./test.txt
a       test
3       four

Theoretically this worked in v0.2.0, but I kind of borked a whole codepath (as you discovered, sorry!), so it probably looked like it wasn't supported.

(edit, see https://github.com/sstadick/hck#splitting-on-multiple-characters)

[sstadick]

(reopening so that you can close it if this does actually satisfy your question!)