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Windows mangles double quotes within single quotes in arguments #3425
Description
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@jetersen For me this works without backslashes in both zsh and bash.
Would you care to elaborate why do you think double quotes need to be escaped? Within single quotes, a double quote is a literal character without any special meaning, so I do not understand why escaping would be necessary.
Additionally, if you find one of our examples to not be working, please point us to the example from our docs and the shell in which you've found it to not be working.
Note that not all shells escape strings the same. We are aware that not all our examples work on cmd.exe, for example. However, it's hard (or impossible) to produce examples that work in every possible shell. We focus on POSIX-compatible shells, and Powershell when possible, for our examples.
Okay, I tested it, and it seems to be a PowerShell terminal thing.
Tested on both PowerShell 5 and 7.Actually CMD does something completely different.
Powershell:
gh api orgs/anorg/repos --paginate --jq '[.[] | select(.default_branch == "master")] | map({ name: .full_name })' > test.json function not defined: master/0CMD:
gh api orgs/anorg/repos --paginate --jq '[.[] | select(.default_branch == "master")] | map({ name: .full_name })' > test.json 'select' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.Powershell and github cli is behavior is not aligned.
Based on https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_quoting_rules?view=powershell-7.1
None of the quoting works as expected.This includes powershell 7 on both Windows and Linux
gh api orgs/anorg/repos --paginate --jq "[.[] | select(.default_branch == ""master"")] | map({ name: .full_name, branch: .default_branch })" > test.json function not defined: master/0
gh api orgs/anorg/repos --paginate --jq "[.[] | select(.default_branch == `"master`")] | map({ name: .full_name, branch: .default_branch })" > test.json function not defined: master/0
$str = @" [.[] | select(.default_branch == "master")] | map({ name: .full_name, branch: .default_branch }) "@ gh api orgs/anorg/repos --paginate --jq $str > test.json function not defined: master/0
$str = @' [.[] | select(.default_branch == "master")] | map({ name: .full_name, branch: .default_branch }) '@ gh api orgs/anorg/repos --paginate --jq $str > test.json function not defined: master/0
Ah, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
The docs that you've linked to explicitly state that this is valid quoting style in powershell:
'hello "beautiful" soul'. The double quotes don't need to be escaped since they are within single quotes.However, when powershell runs an executable (
ghbeing one) and passes arguments to it, it apparently mangles double quotes. Apparently this was known for a long time 🤦So I'm not sure what to do. How should we rewrite this example so that it works both for a POSIX shell and in Powershell with the same syntax?
Reacted by DJ Adams- added and removed
on Apr 15, 2021 I was not aware of this issue in PowerShell 🤔
- changed the title
[-]quotes inside jq need to be escaped with backslashes[/-][+]Windows mangles double quotes within single quotes in arguments[/+]on May 25, 2021 Seems this is getting fixed in powershell though most likely only for powershell 7.2 and onward
- added a commit that references this issue
on Mar 21, 2022
Describe the bug
gh version 1.8.1 (2021-04-02)
https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/tag/v1.8.1
The example for gh api --jq shows that you should use single quotes for the string.
'Take this command for instance.
We spent a few minutes trying different ways of selecting and ended up figuring out that the
"inside the jq string needed backlashes.In both powershell and bash or zsh the single quotes should ensure that everything inside is not interpreted and in powershell you usually escape with backticks.
Expected vs actual behavior
The expected would be the command above but the actual command needs backslashes in powershell