CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonescaping
user2759511
user2759511

Reputation: 640

How to programmatically escape quotes andd slashes

I need a python script to call a bash script on windows. So basically I must make a subprocess call form python, that will call cygwin with the -c option that will call the script I need, The problem is that this script takes a few arguments and that these arguments are full os spaces and quotes and slashes. I'm using code like the following

arq_saida_unix = arq_saida.replace("\\","/")
subprocess.call("C:\\cygwin64\\bin\\bash \".\\retirarVirgula.sh\\ \""+arq_saida+"\"")

Or I'm directly escaping, which sometimes takes me to as much as 8 backslashes in a row, for a backslash to get to my script must be escaped i) in bash ii) in cmd.exe iii) in python

all of this is error prone and takes quite some time every time to get it right.

Is there a better way of doing it? Ideally I wouldn't have any escaping backslashes, but anything that avoids the triple-slash double quote above would be nice.

I tried to use re.escape, but could figure out how exactly to use it , except as a replacement to .replace("\","/") and similar.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 253

Answers (1)

chepner
chepner

Reputation: 532053

Don't pass a single string to call; instead, pass a list consisting of the command name and one argument per element. This saves you from needing to protect special characters from shell interpretation.

subprocess.call(["retirarVirgula.sh", arq_saida], executable=r"C:\cygwin64\bin\bash")

Note: I'm assuming arq_saida contains the single argument to pass to the script; if the script takes multiple arguments, then arc_saida should probably be built as a list as well:

arq_saida = ["arg", "arg two", "arg three"]
subprocess.call(["retirarVirgula.sh"] + arq_saida, executable=r"C:\cygwin64\bin\bash")

Upvotes: 2

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