How to escape single quotes within single quoted strings

Question

Let\'s say, you have a Bash alias like:

alias rxvt=\'urxvt\'

which works fine.

However:

Answer 1

If you're generating the shell string within Python 2 or Python 3, the following may help to quote the arguments:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from __future__ import print_function

try:  # py3
    from shlex import quote as shlex_quote
except ImportError:  # py2
    from pipes import quote as shlex_quote

s = """foo ain't "bad" so there!"""

print(s)
print(" ".join([shlex_quote(t) for t in s.split()]))

This will output:

foo ain't "bad" so there!
foo 'ain'"'"'t' '"bad"' so 'there!'