Treat a single-character delimiter as a plain string delimiter

even if it's a regular expression meta-character

Close #4170

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -59,6 +59,10 @@ Also, fzf now offers three "style presets" for easier customization, which can b
   ```
 - Added `toggle-multi-line` action
 - Added `toggle-hscroll` action
+- A single-character delimiter is now treated as a plain string delimiter rather than a regular expression delimiter, even if it's a regular expression meta-character.
+    - This means you can just write `--delimiter '|'` instead of escaping it as `--delimiter '\|'`
+- Bug fixes
+- Bug fixes in fish scripts (thanks to @bitraid)
 
 0.57.0
 ------

src/options.go

@@ -755,18 +755,23 @@ func delimiterRegexp(str string) Delimiter {
 	// Special handling of \t
 	str = strings.ReplaceAll(str, "\\t", "\t")
 
-	// 1. Pattern does not contain any special character
+	// 1. Pattern is a single character
+	if len([]rune(str)) == 1 {
+		return Delimiter{str: &str}
+	}
+
+	// 2. Pattern does not contain any special character
 	if regexp.QuoteMeta(str) == str {
 		return Delimiter{str: &str}
 	}
 
 	rx, e := regexp.Compile(str)
-	// 2. Pattern is not a valid regular expression
+	// 3. Pattern is not a valid regular expression
 	if e != nil {
 		return Delimiter{str: &str}
 	}
 
-	// 3. Pattern as regular expression. Slow.
+	// 4. Pattern as regular expression. Slow.
 	return Delimiter{regex: rx}
 }
 

src/options_test.go

@@ -9,9 +9,13 @@ import (
 )
 
 func TestDelimiterRegex(t *testing.T) {
-	// Valid regex
+	// Valid regex, but a single character -> string
 	delim := delimiterRegexp(".")
-	if delim.regex == nil || delim.str != nil {
+	if delim.regex != nil || *delim.str != "." {
+		t.Error(delim)
+	}
+	delim = delimiterRegexp("|")
+	if delim.regex != nil || *delim.str != "|" {
 		t.Error(delim)
 	}
 	// Broken regex -> string