"Brian Quinlan" <brian@sweetapp.com> writes:

Hi,

Is it intended that users must escape their own strings, which are passed to the shell? As an example, if I wanted to define a string for the preprocessor, I would have to do something like this:

defines = [('VERSION',r'\"1.2.3\"')]

If I hadn't escaped the double quotes then the shell would have removed them*.

Hang on. Are you sure about this? Consider: (sorry for the long lines) [mwh@starship foo]$ cat setup.py from distutils.core import setup, Extension setup(ext_modules=[Extension("foo", ["foomodule.c"], define_macros=[("FOO",'"a"')])]) [mwh@starship foo]$ cat foomodule.c #include <Python.h> static PyObject* foo_func(PyObject* self, PyObject* args) { return PyString_FromString(FOO); } static PyMethodDef foo_meths[] = { { "func", foo_func } }; void initfoo() { Py_InitModule("foo", foo_meths); } [mwh@starship foo]$ python setup.py build_ext running build_ext building 'foo' extension creating build creating build/temp.linux-i686-2.2 gcc -DNDEBUG -g -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -DFOO="a" -I/home/crew/mwh/include/python2.2 -c foomodule.c -o build/temp.linux-i686-2.2/foomodule.o foomodule.c:15: warning: function declaration isn't a prototype creating build/lib.linux-i686-2.2 gcc -shared build/temp.linux-i686-2.2/foomodule.o -o build/lib.linux-i686-2.2/foo.so [mwh@starship foo]$ PYTHONPATH=build/lib.linux-i686-2.2 python Python 2.2c1+ (#1, Dec 26 2001, 21:36:30) [GCC egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

...

...

import foo foo.func() 'a'

What made you think quotes were disappearing? Cheers, M. -- Important data should not be entrusted to Pinstripe, as it may eat it and make loud belching noises. -- from the announcement of the beta of "Pinstripe" aka. Redhat 7.0