`cargo install foo=1.2.3` does not detect invalid character

[HKalbasi]

Problem

The cargo add foo=1.2.3 says that = is not a valid character for a crate name, but cargo install foo=1.2.3 tries to download foo=1.2.3 crate. If it tries to detect the = and == and suggest using @ both in cargo add and cargo install, it would be even better.

Steps

No response

Possible Solution(s)

No response

Notes

No response

Version

[epage]

Good call on having the two commands match. I think the one benefit to the way cargo install does it is it will allow us to report a correct name if a typo was present which caused it to be invalid. Unsure which is more likely to happen but apparently you ran into this case, so maybe we go with that?

And good idea on checking if @ is missing and reporting that. Depending on the typo, there could be a couple of cases we could hit

• <name><op><version>, like your foo=1.2.3. This could also be ^ or several others. The way to handle this is to check for the first invalid character and split the string on it and see if it parses if a @ is inserted at that point
• <name><version>, like foo1.2.3. This becomes more difficult to catch because there can be numbers in package names but not .. Maybe i we find an invalid character, we backtrack for any digits?

[nooma-42]

Could there also be a crate with multiple invalid characters like foo>=1.2.3 or foo^=1.2.3 or foo:1.2.3? where checking multiple characters is required before replacing with@.

[epage]

: is actually an alternative character to @ and is what was used before cargo add was added.

For the rest of those cases, that is covered by my suggestion to insert @ between the last valid character and the first invalid.