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 a

Answer 1

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())