python - Using subprocess.call with an argument

Related to this question

The question in principle is the same, I have a subprocess.system call

...
EDITOR = os.environ.get('EDITOR', 'vim')
subprocess.call([EDITOR, tf.name])
...

Where EDITOR is the environments $EDITOR variable, tf.name is just a filename.

However, sublime text suggest to set the $EDITOR to export EDITOR='subl -w' Making my call look like this:

subprocess.call(['subl -w', "somefilename"])

And it fails like this:

raceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/note", line 65, in 
    storage["notes"][args.name] = writeNote(args.name, storage)

  File "/usr/bin/note", line 54, in writeNote
    subprocess.call([EDITOR, tf.name])
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 557, in call
    with Popen(*popenargs, **kwargs) as p:
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 947, in __init__
    restore_signals, start_new_session)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 1541, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception_type(errno_num, err_msg)
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'subl -w'

Of course, it's supposed to look likie this

subprocess.call([subl", "-w" "somefilename"])

A workaround would perhaps be

args = EDITOR.split(" ")
subprocess.call(args + ["somefilename"])

But I'm a little wary of doing this, because I cannot know what $EDITOR is set to, is this safe to do?

What's the proper way to handle this case?

Answer

You can rather use shlex. It takes care of UNIX shell like commands.
For example:
>>> shlex.split( "folder\ editor" ) + ["somefilename"]
['folder editor', 'somefilename']
>>> shlex.split( "editor -arg" ) + ["somefilename"]
['editor', '-arg', 'somefilename']

So you should be able to directly do:
subprocess.call( shlex.split(EDITOR) + ["somefilename"] )