oslex2 is an OS-independent wrapper for Python's shlex (POSIX) and mslex (Windows) modules.

Like os.path abstracts over posixpath and ntpath, oslex2 abstracts over shlex and mslex for shell-quoting and splitting.

• Unified API for shell quoting, splitting, and joining on all platforms
• Automatically uses shlex on POSIX and mslex on Windows
• Drop-in replacement for shlex in cross-platform code

pip install oslex2

import oslex2

# Safely quote a string for the shell
cmd = oslex2.quote('foo; rm -rf /')

# Split a shell command into arguments
args = oslex2.split('python -m pip install "oslex2>=1.0.0"')

# Join arguments into a shell command
command = oslex2.join(["python", "-m", "pip", "install", "oslex2>=1.0.0"])

• oslex2.quote(s: str, **kwargs) -> str: Shell-escape a string for safe use as a single token.
• oslex2.split(s: str, **kwargs) -> List[str]: Split a shell command string into arguments.
• oslex2.join(args: List[str]) -> str: Join arguments into a shell-escaped command string.

Note: All functions accept **kwargs and pass them through to the underlying shlex or mslex implementation. This allows you to use platform-specific options (such as posix, punctuation_chars, etc.) as needed.

• On Windows, uses mslex for Windows shell syntax.
• On all other platforms, uses the standard library shlex.

• MIT License (this library)
• mslex is Apache 2.0

• GitHub
• PyPI
• mslex on PyPI