Quoting
=======

Gnulib provides quote and quotearg modules to help with quoting text, such as file names, in messages to the user.  Here's an example of using quote:

     #include <quote.h>
      ...
       error (0, errno, _("cannot change owner of %s"), quote (fname));

This differs from

       error (0, errno, _("cannot change owner of `%s'"), fname);

in that quote escapes unusual characters in fname, e.g., ' and control characters like \n.

However, a caveat: quote reuses the storage that it returns. Hence if you need more than one thing quoted at the same time, you need to use quote_n.

Also, the quote module is not suited for multithreaded applications. In that case, you have to use quotearg_alloc, defined in the quotearg module, which is decidedly less convenient.