Question

I have a list of arguments, e.g. ["hello", "bobbity bob", "bye"]. How would I format these so they would be passed appropriately to a shell?

Wrong:

>>> " ".join(args)
hello bobbity bob bye

Correct:

>>> magic(args)
hello "bobbity bob" bye

Answer 1

You could use the undocumented but long-stable (at least since Oct 2004) subprocess.list2cmdline:

In [26]: import subprocess
In [34]: args=["hello", "bobbity bob", "bye"]

In [36]: subprocess.list2cmdline(args)
Out[36]: 'hello "bobbity bob" bye'