How can I escape double quotes ("") when executing shell command in the post render phase?

[kompre]

Description

Hi,

I'm going mad trying to exectute some shell command (pwsh) that require double quotes ", because it seems that they simply disappear when passed to deno. I think the parser is to blame, since I can't replicate the same behaviour feeding directly the command to a pwsh terminal session (with some adjustment)

Is it possible to escape the double quotes?

• the _quarto.yml:

project:
  title: "double quotes"
  output-dir: _book
  post-render: 
    - |
      pwsh -Command & {
        $filename = 'some file with space.pdf' 
        Copy-Item -Force -Path _book/*pdf -Destination $filename 
        Start-Process -FilePath 'C:\Program Files\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe' -ArgumentList `"$filename`"
      }

• the qmd:

---
title: "double_quotes"
format: pdf
---

## double quotes


the post render does the following, in pwsh
1. set the variable $filename
2. copy the pdf file generated by quarto with $filename
3. open the copied file with SumatraPDF

things falls apart at #3 because the filename has space in it, and `-ArgumentList` will spit a string containing space into a list of arguments. In this case $filename should really be passed enclosed in the double quotes, but the double quotes simply disappears, and I'm not able to escape them so that the string will be formatted correctly

[mcanouil]

Did you triy your command as a script?

Could you try the following code which does not require third party and might help you see what's going on (I don't have a Windows machine or Powershell installed):

pwsh -Command & {
  $filename = 'some file with space.pdf' 
  Set-Content -Path file.txt -Value "`"$filename`""
  Write-Output "`"$filename`""
}

[kompre]

It doesn't work:

• this bit Set-Content -Path file.txt -Value "`"$filename`" will raise an error:

Set-Content: 
Line |
   3 |   Set-Content -Path file.txt -Value `$filename`
     |   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     | A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument 'Write-Output'.

• while this bit Write-Output "`"$filename"`" will print just `$filename" to console

I think that `" is converted to a simple '.

In the end I decided to rewrite the series of command as pwsh script (ps1), so that the post_render look like this:

post-render: 
    - pwsh -Command ./post_render.ps1 'a string with some space.pdf'

And it works well enough.

[mcanouil]

The formatting of your inline code makes it hard to read, could you fix it? As for code blocks use more backticks on the outside `` Some text with ` in it ` ``.