I'm using python's argparse module to get arguments from the command line and log in a website, for example: python app.py username password. However, I realized that some more complex passwords may include regular expressions such as '#' or '$', and the args.password will end up being either ignored or modified by the MacOS terminal: python app.py username #pa$$word.
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("username", help="website account username", type=str)
parser.add_argument("password", help="website account password", type=str)
args = parser.parse_args()
How can I avoid this behavior without having to hardcode these str arguments?
You are not really talking about regular expressions.
Further the problem is not python, but your shell.
you had to call your script with
python app.py username '#pa$$word'
and sys.argv[2] will contain the password.
If you have a password containing a single quote ('), then you had to replace it with a triple single quote '\'' where the second ' is prefixed with a \
As others said already:
It is considered bad practice to pass passwords as command line arguments to a script as anybody being able to type ps on the same machine will see the password.
More common options are, that you