Error reporting

HughP · July 24, 2019, 5:52am

When a Hugo shortcode is unclosed with }} and one has hugo server running it reports the following error:

Rebuild failed:

"/home/somelong/path/some-file.md:27:184": unrecognized character in shortcode action: U+003E '>'. Note: Parameters with non-alphanumeric args must be quoted

Wile the report is not inaccurate, it would be more useful to directly declare that the shortcode was not closed… I’m curious is this sort of thing possible in Hugo — smarter (more contextual) error messages? I went hunting for the U+003E character only to find I needed actually to add some }}.

bep · July 24, 2019, 3:12pm

I think that in general we provide pretty good (contextual) error messges in Hugo. In this case you do get the filename and line number and column number, if you run it in server mode you will probably also get a preview of the “problem area” in the error web page.

That said, it can always be better, but I’m not sure that your particular example is worth the added logic. The error message is produced here{

github.com

gohugoio/hugo/blob/c52045bbb38cbf64b9cb39352230060aa122cc9f/parser/pageparser/pagelexer_shortcode.go#L297


		if l.peek() == '"' {
			return lexShortcodeParam(l, true)
		}
	case l.elementStepNum > 0 && (isAlphaNumericOrHyphen(r) || r == '"'): // positional params can have quotes
		l.backup()
		return lexShortcodeParam(l, false)
	case isAlphaNumeric(r):
		l.backup()
		return lexIdentifierInShortcode
	default:
		return l.errorf("unrecognized character in shortcode action: %#U. Note: Parameters with non-alphanumeric args must be quoted", r)
	}
	return lexInsideShortcode
}


func (l *pageLexer) currentLeftShortcodeDelimItem() ItemType {
	return l.currLeftDelimItem
}


func (l *pageLexer) currentRightShortcodeDelimItem() ItemType {
	return l.currRightDelimItem