CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonsubprocess
user451500
user451500

Reputation: 301

Python subprocess call with arguments having multiple quotations

I use the following command in bash to execute a Python script.

python myfile.py -c "'USA'" -g "'CA'" -0 "'2011-10-13'" -1 "'2011-10-27'"

I'm writing a Python script to wrap around this one. I'm currently having to use os.system (I know, it's crappy) since I can't figure out how to get the quotes to work with subprocess.Popen. The inner single quotes must be maintained in the string variables that are passed in.

Can someone please help me determine how to format the first variable passed to subprocess.Popen.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 15792

Answers (3)

Cédric Julien
Cédric Julien

Reputation: 80761

You should be able to launch your script with subprocess.Popen even with quoted parameters : 

subprocess.Popen([
   "/usr/bin/python", 
   "myfile.py",
   "-c",
   "'USA'",
   "-g",
   "'CA'",
   "-0",
   "'2011-10-13'",
   "-1",
   "'2011-10-27'",
])

Upvotes: 4

fabmilo
fabmilo

Reputation: 48310

You don't need to escape the values. To the process everything is passed as a string.

You can use the shlex module to figure out what is the best way to pass variables:

import shlex
shlex.split('python myfile.py -c "USA" -g "CA" -0 "2011-10-13" -1 "2011-10-27"') 
['python',
 'myfile.py',
 '-c',
 'USA',
 '-g',
 'CA',
 '-0',
 '2011-10-13',
 '-1',
 '2011-10-27']

Upvotes: 8

jcollado
jcollado

Reputation: 40374

Have you tried this?

import subprocess
subprocess.Popen(['python', 'myfile.py', '-c', "'USA'", '-g', "'CA'", '-0', "'2011-10-13'", -1, "'2011-10-27'"]).communicate()

You could use this in myfile.py to check that what you get from bash is the same as what you get from subprocess.Popen (in my case it matches):

import sys
print sys.argv

Upvotes: 0

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