Store output of subprocess.Popen call in a string

Question

I\'m trying to make a system call in Python and store the output to a string that I can manipulate in the Python program.

#!/usr/bin/python
import subprocess         


        

Answer 1

The accepted answer is still good, just a few remarks on newer features. Since python 3.6, you can handle encoding directly in check_output, see documentation. This returns a string object now:

import subprocess 
out = subprocess.check_output(["ls", "-l"], encoding="utf-8")

In python 3.7, a parameter capture_output was added to subprocess.run(), which does some of the Popen/PIPE handling for us, see the python docs :

import subprocess 
p2 = subprocess.run(["ls", "-l"], capture_output=True, encoding="utf-8")
p2.stdout