handling selectors with '.' within the element name

[link4531]

Edit It may be more appropriate to refer to as 'node name' or 'selector value'
say I have a yaml/json structure such as

>this.file:
>   -this.attribute: value

what syntax do I need to provide dasel to updating this.attribute to 'newvalue'

>./dasel -p yaml -s this.\file.this.\attribute newvalue

this command breaks out ths,file,this,attribute in to separate nodes. I was hoping the '\' character would solve this but it didn't help. Any suggestions?

[TomWright]

You just need to escape the dot. The backslash does do this, but you are putting in the wrong place. The backslash needs to come before the character you want to escape.

E.g.

 echo 'this.file:
  - this.attribute: value' | dasel put string -p yaml '.this\.file.[0].this\.attribute' newvalue

this.file:
- this.attribute: newvalue

[link4531]

(ノ°Д°）ノ︵ ┻━┻

• deep sigh *

Its lessons like this, that will give me night terrors 10 years down the road.

Thank you sir for assisting me.

I swear I had tried every method of using '\' even the example you provided ( obviously I was wrong )
What I did discover is every way to do it wrong...

[postscripter8]

Hello Sir, I just found this fantastic tool as I attempted to automate containerd configuration process for my lab. Unfortunately the latest dasel version tokenizes queries differently and I can't quite get it to work with my config.toml file. The example you provided fails to parse with

dasel: error: error parsing selector: failed to tokenize: unexpected token: \ at position 5.

I need to adjust SystemdCgroup value in the minimized example below. I don't know whose vile idea it was to put apostrophes in the key name [plugins.'io.containerd.cri.v1.runtime'.containerd.runtimes.runc.options]

version = 4
[plugins]
  [plugins.'io.containerd.cri.v1.runtime']
    enable_selinux = false

    [plugins.'io.containerd.cri.v1.runtime'.containerd]
      default_runtime_name = 'runc'

      [plugins.'io.containerd.cri.v1.runtime'.containerd.runtimes]
        [plugins.'io.containerd.cri.v1.runtime'.containerd.runtimes.runc]
          runtime_type = 'io.containerd.runc.v2'

          [plugins.'io.containerd.cri.v1.runtime'.containerd.runtimes.runc.options]
            ShimCgroup = ''
            SystemdCgroup = false

I attempted query string 'plugins.io\.containerd\.cri\.v1\.runtime.containerd.runtimes.runc.options' but it failed in a similar manner.

dasel: error: error parsing selector: failed to tokenize: unexpected token: \ at position 10.

[postscripter8]

Oh, I just found my exact use case in #130.

[postscripter8]

Eh... I got bored waiting for a reply and decided to stop being lazy for once. Found the answer in https://github.com/TomWright/dasel/blob/master/selector/lexer/tokenize.go#L185

This does what I need in dasel v3.11.2:

<config.toml dasel -i toml --root "plugins['io.containerd.cri.v1.runtime'].containerd.runtimes.runc.options.SystemdCgroup=true"