Gitignore - Escaped #, !, Bracket and Trailing Space
Every escape the format defines, including the one nobody expects: a trailing space is stripped from a pattern unless it is backslash-escaped, so `draft\ ` and `draft` ignore different files. Editors that trim trailing whitespace on save silently change what this file means.
# A file literally named '#notes.md' — the hash must be escaped or it is a comment
\#notes.md
# A file literally named '!important.txt' — the bang must be escaped or it negates
\!important.txt
# Trailing spaces are stripped unless escaped; this ignores 'draft ' with one space
draft\
# A literal bracket, not a character class
report\[1\].csv
# Not a comment: only a hash in column 1 starts one
build/#temp
Specifications
- Seed
- 20260807
- Repository Name
- .gitignore
- Patterns
- 5
- Escapes
- 6
- Has Significant Trailing Space
- true
- Line Endings
- LF
- Encoding
- UTF-8
Testing contract
Expected to pass- Scenario
- Parse patterns whose leading # and ! are escaped and whose trailing space is significant.
- Expected result
- Five patterns are parsed, none of them treated as a comment or a negation; the third ignores the name 'draft ' with one trailing space, not 'draft'.
What is a .gitignore file?
A .gitignore file tells Git which untracked paths to leave alone. Each line is a pattern: a leading `/` anchors it to the containing directory, a trailing `/` restricts it to directories, `!` re-includes a previously excluded path, `**` matches across directory boundaries, and `#` introduces a comment. Rules are evaluated in order, with the last matching pattern winning, and nested .gitignore files layer on top of parent ones.
How to use this file
Use an example .gitignore file to test ignore-pattern engines in build tools, bundlers, linters, and container builders, checking negation ordering, anchored versus floating patterns, and directory-only rules against a documented set of expected matches.
How to use this file for testing
“Gitignore - Escaped #, !, Bracket and Trailing Space” is a deterministic Novus Examples fixture for Config parsing, Config testing, Visual diff / regression. TOML and INI configuration files with nested sections and typed values — for testing config parsers and loaders.
Documented properties for this file: seed 20260807 · UTF-8 · LF. Compare results against paired or grouped companions on this page when present (clean↔damaged, searchable↔scanned, or format twins) so scores stay reproducible across runs.
Download the file once, keep the path stable in CI or local scripts, and treat the spec table as the contract: dimensions, seeds, field lists, and roles are intentional. Corrupt or invalid samples are labelled as such — expect parsers to fail loudly rather than silently accept them.
Diff and patch fixtures name their target paths and the exact edge case they exercise — rename, mode change, binary hunk, CRLF↔LF, or missing trailing newline. Apply or render them against the documented before-state; every author, path, and hash is fictional.
Point your config loader at the file and assert it reads the documented sections and typed values, including any deliberately-tricky nesting or comments.
Related files
- txtCODEOWNERS - Overlapping Globs With Documented WinnersDeliberately overlapping rules so every interesting path matches two or three of them, which is the only way to test that a resolver applies last-match-wins rather than most-specific-wins. One rule has no owners at all, which clears inherited ownership instead of adding any.
- gitattributesGitattributes - LFS Filters, Linguist Hints and export-ignoreThe non-EOL half of the format: LFS filter/diff/merge triples, `linguist-generated` and `linguist-vendored` hints that hide files from language statistics and review, `export-ignore` entries that drop paths from `git archive`, and a `merge=union` driver for an append-only changelog. Attribute values are unquoted and space-separated, so column alignment is whitespace a parser must collapse.
- gitconfigGitconfig - includeIf Conditions in Four FlavoursEvery conditional-include form git supports — path prefix, case-insensitive path prefix, branch glob, and a condition on an existing remote URL — plus one unconditional include. Order matters: a later include overrides an earlier one, so a parser that gathers includes into a set rather than a list resolves the wrong identity.
- gitconfigGitconfig - Sections, Quoted Subsections and Shell AliasesA realistic global config exercising the whole INI-like grammar: bracketed sections, quoted subsection names that are case-sensitive while section names are not, values with size suffixes, a shell alias whose leading `!` changes how the rest is executed, and both comment characters.
- gitignoreGitignore - Globstar, Anchors and Character ClassesOne pattern per rule in the gitignore grammar: a leading slash that anchors to the containing directory, the same name unanchored, `**` in all three positions, `?` and `[...]` classes, and a trailing slash that matches only directories. Every line is a separate assertion for a matcher's test suite.
- gitignoreGitignore - Negation After a Directory Exclusion (No Effect)The single most misunderstood rule in the format: once `build/` excludes a directory, git does not descend into it, so `!build/keep.txt` is dead. The file is valid and the behaviour is documented — it is the author's expectation that is wrong, which is exactly why an ignore-matcher must reproduce it rather than being helpful.
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