How to deal with string containing spaces in Vim script?

Question

I have the following command in my vimrc:

execute "set path+=".getcwd()."/**"

It works well if current working directory is like /home/tamlok/my_work/. However, if the directory contains spaces, such as D:\Program Files\vim\, vim will complain.

I suppose that I can fix this using substitute() function to replace all the spaces with escaped spaces. What would an experienced vimmer do here?

Another issue is the \ in Windows. If getcwd() gets D:\Program Files\vim\, do I need to escape the \ with \\ or replace it with /?

For now I handle it like this:

let mycwd=substitute(getcwd(), '\\', '/', 'g')
let mycwd=substitute(mycwd, ' ', '\\ ', 'g')
execute "set path+=".mycwd."/**"

Is that OK? Any help is appreciated! Thanks very much!

Answer 1

The function you are looking for is fnameescape(). It will escape all special characters in a given string containing a path to a file to match the standard of the current operating system.

For more on this see :help fnameescape()

Answer 2

I had the same problem. Try just to use / in paths, and escape whitespace like this \ . For example I add this line in my vimrc:

set rtp=C:/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Vim/vim74/vim.exe

Than if you will command :echo &rtp you can see:

C:/Program Files (x86)/Vim/vim74/vim.exe

Note that here is no \ before whitespace.