TCL list element in quotes followed by } instead of space - string

Question

I'm trying to write an automated validation test on a small program using TCL. It should evaluate the input h1=7 and pass if the output is 7.000000. Likewise, the input h1=9 should pass if the output is 9.0000. However, I get the following error:
ERROR: list element in quotes followed by "}" instead of space
while executing
"foreach pattern $testdata {
set inputs [ lindex $pattern 0 ]
set expected [ lindex $pattern 1 ]
eval "spawn $CLIC $inputs"
expect {..."
(file "./test/clic/test-clic.exp" line 22)
Here is the code:
#!/usr/bin/expect
set tool "clic"
set CLIC "./clic "
set testdata {
{"h1=7" "7.000000"}
{"h1=9" "9.000000"}
}
# global CLIC
foreach pattern $testdata {
set inputs [ lindex $pattern 0 ]
set expected [ lindex $pattern 1 ]
eval "spawn $CLIC $inputs"
expect {
$expected { pass $inputs }
default { fail $inputs }
}
}
How do I resolve this? Thank you.

Answer 1

Given the error message given and the discrepancy between the line number in the error message and the number of lines in the script you told us about, I'm guessing that you've trimmed down the script a little bit before asking the question. Which would be perfectly OK (and a good thing) except that in the trimming process you removed the thing that was causing the problem! The code that you posted doesn't have the issue.
The issue is almost certainly in one of the lines of testdata that you removed. It's either that you've got malformatted list as testdata, or that it produces a malformatted script when you do the concatenations for the eval "spawn …"; unfortunately, I can't be sure which with the info you've given us. (It's also possibly an issue in the expect with it not liking taking a value from a variable when that argument is in braces; the documentation for expect isn't very clear about this case, yet it gives hints that it might do what you want.)
A good start would be to update the script to actually use the features of Tcl 8.6 (or Tcl 8.5) since you're already using that version. The key changes happen to these lines:
foreach pattern $testdata {
set inputs [ lindex $pattern 0 ]
set expected [ lindex $pattern 1 ]
eval "spawn $CLIC $inputs"
Which are much better written as:
foreach pattern $testdata {
lassign $pattern inputs expected
spawn {*}$CLIC {*}$inputs
That has far fewer ways of being misinterpreted than what you were using before, as well as being shorter. We can also wrap that all up in code to give better error handling:
foreach pattern $testdata {
if {[catch {
lassign $pattern inputs expected
spawn {*}$CLIC {*}$inputs
} msg]} {
puts stderr "Problem handling pattern '$pattern': $msg"
continue
}
If you still get the same failure at that point, the problem is almost certainly that your overall testdata is a malformed list (and it would be malformed like this: "something"{something else} with no whitespace between closing quotes and opening braces); since that's under your complete control, you'll just have to fix it…