Re: Possible new issue introduced with 20140316 release

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Russ Tyndall <[email protected]> wrote:
> The reason to switch to intern, is that intern will always return a symbol where read-from-string could return any valid lisp type.  Read-from-string will also stop reading if it reaches a space while valid symbols may contain spaces.

I'm already late to this party, but I'm voting for using
read-from-string here. As long as you're printing with
*print-readably* t, read-from-string will handle spaces, package
names, things that don't look like symbols, and mixed case (e.g
(make-symbol "1") => #:|1|, (make-symbol "flub") => #:|flub|). If
you're going to roll your own parser, you'll have to take care to deal
with syntax like the | escape, or you may wind up with symbols like
#:|\|foo\||.

It seems to me the easiest and most robust solution is something like:
(let ((o (read-from-string s)))
  (check-type o symbol)
  o)

Then you'd just have to make sure you bind *print-readably* and
*read-eval* on output/input, respectively.

-Matt Stickney