CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonbashshell
Sam Roberts
Sam Roberts

Reputation: 399

How can I escape any of the special shell characters in a Python string?

How can I escape any of the special shell characters in a Python string?

The following characters need to be escaped:

$,!,#,&,",',(,),|,<,>,`,\,;

For example say I have this string:

str="The$!cat#&ran\"'up()a|<>tree`\;"

TIA

Upvotes: 12

Views: 12159

Answers (3)

buydadip
buydadip

Reputation: 9417

re.sub will do the job:

re.sub("(!|\$|#|&|\"|\'|\(|\)|\||<|>|`|\\\|;)", r"\\\1", astr)

Output

The\$\!cat\#\&ran\"\'up\(\)a\|\<\>tree\`\\\;

Upvotes: 3

Alex Martelli
Alex Martelli

Reputation: 881605

Not sure why you want to escape everything rather than quote as much as feasible, but, this should do it (replace '@' with another character not present in your string, if needed):

>>> escape_these = r'([$!#&"()|<>`\;' + "'])"
>>> print(re.sub(escape_these, r'@\1', s).replace('@','\\'))
The\$\!cat\#\&ran\"\'up\(\)a\|\<\>tree\`\\;

It may be doable with a tad less escape-trickery, but the unfortunate fact that strings, re, and the shell, all use the \ (backslash) for escaping and other special purposes, does complicate things a bit:-).

Upvotes: 2

5gon12eder
5gon12eder

Reputation: 25409

In Python3, the required batteries are included as shlex.quote.

shlex.quote(s)

Return a shell-escaped version of the string s. The returned value is a string that can safely be used as one token in a shell command line […].

In your example:

import shlex

s = "The$!cat#&ran\"'up()a|<>tree`\;"
print(shlex.quote(s))

Output:

'The$!cat#&ran"'"'"'up()a|<>tree`\;'

Upvotes: 27

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