reading special characters text from .ini file in python

Question

I am running a script which takes a text "rAh%19u^l\&G" i.e which contains special characters as seen.

When i pass this text in my script as a argument it runs fine without any error.

example - : ./abc.py <username><pwd>

The above text is basically a password.

Now, when i place my values in a config file and read the above text, the script fails.

*******abc.ini *******

[DEFAULT]
username = rahul
pwd =  rAh%19u^l\&G

it says

/bin/sh:M command not found.

Reading the above values with help of config parser

******Below is the program abc.py ******

#! /usr/bin/python

parser = configparser.ConfigParser()
parser.read('abc.ini')
username = parser.get('DEFAULT','username')
pwd = parser.get('DEFAULT','pwd')


p = subprocess.Popen(
    "abc.py {0} {1}" .format(username, pwd), 
    shell=True, 
    stdout=subprocess.PIPE
)

out, err = p.communicate()

print(out)

I tried searching a lot but found nothing concrete.

So the question is how to read a text that contains special characters in a .ini file.

Answer 1

Looks like the % character is the problem here. It has special meaning if you are using ConfigParser. If you are not using interpolation, then use just RawConfigParser instead, otherwise you must escape the % by doubling it.

When I try the example file with ConfigParser it will blow with the following exception:

InterpolationSyntaxError: '%' must be followed by '%' or '(', found: '%19u^l\\&G"'

If I replace ConfigParser with RawConfigParser everything is fine.

The error you posted has nothing to do with it. We can't even tell if it is a python exception or a shell error message. Please update your question with the full error message. You may also want to check the sh module, a higher level wrapper around subprocess.