CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azure-devopsazure-pipelinesazure-pipelines-yaml
whatever
whatever

Reputation: 3687

Azure DevOps pipelines : backslashes in parameters - do they need to be escaped and how?

I'm using a pipeline template and have a few string runtime parameters that will be file systems paths and they contain backslashes, I was echoing them out to test the template pipeline and have tried all possible approaches

Echoing out all these different strings never displays backslashes and it doesn't seem to me to be a log display issue (accessing the raw log I never see a single backslash however I pass the paths).

This is my simple pipeline template to test what I'm doing

parameters:
- name: string1
  type: string
  default: C:\APPS\XYZ\
- name: string2
  type: string
  default: 'C:\APPS\XYZ\'
- name: string3
  type: string
  default: "C:\\APPS\\XYZ\\"

jobs:
- job: JOB
  displayName: JOB
  steps:
  - checkout: none
  - script: |
      echo 1 ${{ parameters.string1 }}
      echo 2 ${{ parameters.string2 }}
      echo 3 ${{ parameters.string3 }}

Upvotes: 2

Views: 7995

Answers (2)

whatever
whatever

Reputation: 3687

In the end the disappearance of the backslashes was only in echoing out values. I don't fully understand why this is happening but clearly the backslash is a special character and gets interpreted. By putting the strings to be printed inside single quotes this does not occur and the parameter values get printed out correctly.

This is the correct code

parameters:
- name: string1
  type: string
  # no quotes
  default: C:\APPS\XYZ\
- name: string2
  type: string
  # single quotes
  default: 'C:\APPS\XYZ\'
- name: string3
  type: string
  # double quotes
  default: "C:\\APPS\\XYZ\\"

steps:
- checkout: none
- script: |
    echo '1 ${{ parameters.string1 }}'
    echo '2 ${{ parameters.string2 }}'
    echo '3 ${{ parameters.string3 }}'

Upvotes: 1

Nikolay
Nikolay

Reputation: 3

First of all, you have a mistake in the second value - the single quote at the start is missing.

Second, you don't need quotes in paramaters value. If you set double quotes the rules for text are changed.

http://blogs.perl.org/users/tinita/2018/03/strings-in-yaml---to-quote-or-not-to-quote.html

Upvotes: 0

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