[SOLVED] Automatic backslash escape sequences?

[Jadd]

Brilliant! That -- trick is just what I need.

[Jadd]

I just discovered that bash uses single quotes to preserve the literal value of a string (including spaces and stuff). The only problem with that is when your filename includes single quotes, but I found the workaround.

So here's some code with their results:

import subprocess
# we need to pass shell as True to let bash interpret the single quotes as it normally would
subprocess.call("touch 'a new day.txt'", shell=True) # creates: a new day.txt
subprocess.call(r"touch 'a'\''new'\''day.txt'", shell=True) # creates: a'new'day.txt 

Here's a function I wrote to automatically surrond with single quotes, replacing any single quotes with the appropriate string:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import subprocess

def surround_with_single_quotes(string):
    """Surrounds the passed string with single quotes and replaces any
    quotes with '\'' required by bash
    >>> surround_with_single_quotes("a'new'day.txt")
    "'a'\\\\''new'\\\\''day.txt'"
    
    The previous example returns (without python's quotes and escape sequences):
    'a'\''new'\''day.txt'
    """
    str = string.replace("'", r"'\''")
    str = "'" + str + "'"
    return str

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import doctest
    doctest.testmod()
    subprocess.call("touch " + surround_with_single_quotes("a'new'day.txt"), shell=True)