Passing a shell variable to inline python in a shell script

Question

I have a simple shell script where i want to be able to pass variables to some inline python i will write. For example like this

funny=879
echo $funny
python -c "
print(f"hello {$funny}")
"

However this prints

879
  File "<string>", line 2
    print(fhello
               ^
SyntaxError: unexpected EOF while parsing
(pipeline) $ 

Any thoughts on what i could be doing wrong? I know i am setting the variable correct because when i do echo it prints out the variable so it is definitely set correct but for some reason python script is not able to use it.

Answer 1

It's because you're using outer double quotes.

python -c "print(f"hello {$funny}")"

Gets turned into:

python -c print(fhello {879})

So python is passed 2 separate strings.

The inner double quotes would need to be escaped in order to get passed through to python.

$ funny=879; python3 -c "print(f\"hello $funny\")"
hello 879

Instead of messing around with quoting - if you export your variables you can access them from python using the os.environ dict.

$ export funny=879; python -c 'import os; print(os.environ["funny"])'
879