Python argparse argument with quotes

Question

Is there any way I can tell argparse to not eat quotation marks?

For example, When I give an argument with quotes, argparse only takes what's inside of the quotes as the argument. I want to capture the quotation marks as well (without having to escape them on the command line.)

pbsnodes -x | xmlparse -t "interactive-00"

produces

interactive-00

I want

"interactive-00"

Solution 1

I think it is the shell that eats them, so python will actually never see them. Escaping them on the command line may be your only option.

If it's the \"backslash\" style escaping you don't like for some reason, then this way should work instead:

pbsnodes -x | xmlparse -t '"interactive-00"'

Solution 2

Command line is parsed into argument vector by python process itself. Depending on how python is built, that would be done by some sort of run-time library. For Windows build, that would be most likely MS Visual C++ runtime library. More details about how it parses command line can be found in Visual C++ documentation: Parsing C++ command-Line arguments.

In particular:

• A string surrounded by double quotation marks ("string") is interpreted as a single argument, regardless of white space contained within. A quoted string can be embedded in an argument.

• A double quotation mark preceded by a backslash (\") is interpreted as a literal double quotation mark character (").

If you want to see unprocessed command line, on Windows you can do this:

import win32api
print(win32api.GetCommandLine())

Comments

[kindall]

This is exactly the case. The shell sees the quotes as "take whatever's in here even if it contains spaces." And it does so. That's what quotes are for in the shell.

[Abhay Dwivedi]

Thanks for the nice solution.

[il--ya]

Is it the shell or the c run time library? Shell passes command to the process as is, it's up to the RTL to parse the arguments. I think it's perl's rtl which eats the quotations, or something else down the line.