Question

I’m considering porting a rather unwieldy bash script to python but I’m stuck on how to handle the following aspect: The point of the script is to generate a png image depending on dynamically fetched data. The bash script grabs the data, and builds a very long invocation of the convert utility, with lots of options. It seemed like python’s template strings would be a good solution (I would vastly prefer to stay within the standard library, since I’ll be deploying to shared hosting), but I discovered that you can’t evaluate expressions as you can in bash:

>>> from string import Template
>>> s = Template('The width times one is ${width}')
>>> s.substitute(width=45)
'The width times one is 45'
>>> t = Template('The width times two is ${width*2}')
>>> t.substitute(width=45)
# Raises ValueError

Since my bash script depends quite heavily on such arithmetic (otherwise the number of variables to keep track of would increase exponentially) I’d like to know if there’s a way to emulate this behavior in python. I saw that this question, asking roughly the same, has a comment, reading:

This would be very unPythonic, because it’s counterintuitive — strings are just
strings, they shouldn’t run code!

If this is the case, what would be a more idiomatic way to approach this problem?
The proposed answer to the question linked above is to use string formatting with either the % syntax or the format() function, but I don’t think that would work well with the number of variables in my string (around 50).

Answer 1

The Pythonic solution to this problem is to forget about string formatting and pass a list of arguments to one of the subprocess functions, e.g.

# I have no idea about convert's command line usage,
# so here's an example using echo.
subprocess.call(["echo", str(1 + 1), "bla"])

That way, there’s no need to build a single string and no need to worry about quoting.