What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Define a [testenv] command like so: [testenv] command=nosetests -w src -m (?:^|[\b_./-])(?:unit)?[Tt]est [] 2.Run tox -- -vv

What is the expected output? What do you see instead? I expect the command to be: nosetests -w src -m (?:^|[\b_./-])(?:unit)?[Tt]est -vv

What actually happens is a parse error in nose because tox has changed the regular expression: [TOX] /Users/crose/projects/advanis/9163_saas/xml2py$ .tox/py27/bin/nosetests -w src -m (?:^|-v Traceback (most recent call last): File ".tox/py27/bin/nosetests", line 9, in <module> load_entry_point('nose==1.0.0', 'console_scripts', 'nosetests')() File "/Users/crose/projects/advanis/9163_saas/xml2py/.tox/py27/lib/python2.7/site-packages/nose/core.py", line 118, in init **extra_args) File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7/lib/python2.7/unittest/main.py", line 94, in init self.parseArgs(argv) File "/Users/crose/projects/advanis/9163_saas/xml2py/.tox/py27/lib/python2.7/site-packages/nose/core.py", line 135, in parseArgs self.config.configure(argv, doc=self.usage()) File "/Users/crose/projects/advanis/9163_saas/xml2py/.tox/py27/lib/python2.7/site-packages/nose/config.py", line 317, in configure self.testMatch = re.compile(options.testMatch) File "/Users/crose/projects/advanis/9163_saas/xml2py/.tox/py27/lib/python2.7/re.py", line 190, in compile return _compile(pattern, flags) File "/Users/crose/projects/advanis/9163_saas/xml2py/.tox/py27/lib/python2.7/re.py", line 245, in _compile raise error, v # invalid expression sre_constants.error: unbalanced parenthesis

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system? tox --version 0.9 imported from /usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tox/init.pyc

Please provide any additional information below. I can see from the code in _config.py:314 that there is no mechanism for escaping square brackets in commands; either they'll be eaten completely (line 319) or naively replaced with the positional arguments irrespective of their contents.

For what it's worth, I suspect that fixes for this will be partially related to #10.

As a solution, I recommend removing some of the substitution flexiblity; only replace '[]' with positional arguments, not '[[.*]]'

Here's a patch against 986af63ee60e that provides for the following changes:

1. only support posargs replacement using [] if [] is a single word in the command. No text is allowed between the two brackets.
2. add a new {posargs:} syntax. This will be replaced by posargs if they are provided, or by the default otherwise. The default and posargs can themselves be {} constructs.

Here's an extra test case patch that verifies that this change also fixes #10

In lieu of incorporating these patches, please just pull from https://offby1-pytox.googlecode.com/hg/

That way I can keep track of changes.

Any word on when/if this will be pulled into core?

will try to incorporate it in the next days, thanks already.

thanks a lot for your nice patch, am about to apply it. One more question: are you fine with contributing to tox under the MIT license? I'd like to retain the possibility to re-license tox later (currently GPL2 or later).

and is "Chris R" the way you want to be referred to, btW?

The MIT license is fine by me.

Please credit me as "Chris Rose" with email address offby1@offby1.net (if applicable)

thanks, i merged your changes now. (did get a little child in between so was away :)

No worries; I'm a (relatively) new father myself, so I totally get that.