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Documentation (Development)

The goal is to offer a similar set of functionality as pexpect.

Basic usage

Add this to your Cargo.toml

toml [dependencies] rexpect = "0.3"

Simple example for interacting via ftp:

```rust extern crate rexpect;

use rexpect::spawn; use rexpect::errors::*;

fn doftp() -> Result<()> { let mut p = spawn("ftp speedtest.tele2.net", Some(30000))?; p.expregex("Name \(.*\):")?; p.sendline("anonymous")?; p.expstring("Password")?; p.sendline("test")?; p.expstring("ftp>")?; p.sendline("cd upload")?; p.expstring("successfully changed.\r\nftp>")?; p.sendline("pwd")?; p.expregex("[0-9]+ \"/upload\"")?; p.sendline("exit")?; p.exp_eof()?; Ok(()) }

fn main() { doftp().unwrapor_else(|e| panic!("ftp job failed with {}", e)); } ```

Example with bash and reading from programs

```rust

extern crate rexpect; use rexpect::spawn_bash; use rexpect::errors::*;

fn foo() -> Result<()> { let mut p = spawn_bash(Some(2000))?;

// case 1: wait until program is done
p.send_line("hostname")?;
let hostname = p.read_line()?;
p.wait_for_prompt()?; // go sure `hostname` is really done
println!("Current hostname: {}", hostname);

// case 2: wait until done, only extract a few infos
p.send_line("wc /etc/passwd")?;
// `exp_regex` returns both string-before-match and match itself, discard first
let (_, lines) = p.exp_regex("[0-9]+")?;
let (_, words) = p.exp_regex("[0-9]+")?;
let (_, bytes) = p.exp_regex("[0-9]+")?;
p.wait_for_prompt()?; // go sure `wc` is really done
println!("/etc/passwd has {} lines, {} words, {} chars", lines, words, bytes);

// case 3: read while program is still executing
p.execute("ping 8.8.8.8", "bytes of data")?; // returns when it sees "bytes of data" in output
for _ in 0..5 {
    // times out if one ping takes longer than 2s
    let (_, duration) = p.exp_regex("[0-9. ]+ ms")?;
    println!("Roundtrip time: {}", duration);
}
p.send_control('c')?;

} ```

Example with bash and job control

One frequent bitfall with sending ctrl-c and friends is that you need to somehow ensure that the program has fully loaded, otherwise the ctrl-* goes into nirvana. There are two functions to ensure that:

```rust extern crate rexpect; use rexpect::spawn_bash; use rexpect::errors::*;

fn run() -> Result<()> { let mut p = spawnbash(Some(1000))?; p.execute("ping 8.8.8.8", "bytes of data")?; p.sendcontrol('z')?; p.waitforprompt()?; // bash writes 'ping 8.8.8.8' to stdout again to state which job was put into background p.execute("bg", "ping 8.8.8.8")?; p.waitforprompt()?; p.sendline("sleep 1")?; p.waitforprompt()?; // bash writes 'ping 8.8.8.8' to stdout again to state which job was put into foreground p.execute("fg", "ping 8.8.8.8")?; p.sendcontrol('c')?; p.exp_string("packet loss")?; Ok(()) }

```

Project Status

Rexpect covers more or less the features of pexpect. If you miss anything I'm happy to receive PRs or also Issue requests of course.

The tests cover most of the aspects and it should run out of the box for rust stable, beta and nightly on both Linux or Mac.

That said, I don't know of too many people using it yet, so use this with caution.

Design decisions