Eryk Sun added the comment:

> Windows also treats full-width spaces as a delimiter when parsing 
> command line arguments.

CreateProcess has to parse the beginning of the command-line string if the 
lpApplicationName parameter is omitted. According to the documentation, it 
treats "white space" as a delimiter, but it doesn't actually say which 
characters are in that set. We know for an unquoted name like 
"python{character}spam" that it will try to execute python.exe if "{character}" 
is parsed as a space. Otherwise we expect CreateProcess to fail with 
ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND because it's looking for the non-existent file 
"python{character}spam". Here's a test that checks all characters that Unicode 
considers to be whitespace, which includes "ideographic space" (U+3000):

    import os
    import sys
    import subprocess

    space_chars = [chr(c) for c in range(sys.maxunicode) if chr(c).isspace()]
    assert '\N{IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE}' in space_chars # U+3000

    def get_create_delims():
        assert not os.path.exists('spam')
        filename = 'python{}spam'
        basepath = os.path.dirname(sys.executable)
        delims = []
        for space in space_chars:
            path = os.path.join(basepath, filename.format(space))
            assert not os.path.exists(path)
            try:
                subprocess.check_output(path, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
            except FileNotFoundError:
                pass # not a delimiter
            except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
                delims.append(space)
            else:
                assert False, 'python.exe should have failed'
        return delims


    >>> get_create_delims()
    ['\t', ' ']

CreateProcess considers only space and horizontal tab as white-space 
delimiters, at least on this Windows 10 system.

Otherwise Windows itself doesn't care about the command line. It's up to each 
application to parse its command line however it wants. subprocess.list2cmdline 
assumes an application uses argv from Microsoft's C runtime. The Windows shell 
function CommandLineToArgvW is supposed to follow the same rules. The following 
calls CommandLineToArgvW on a test command-line string for each character in 
the space_chars set:

    import ctypes
    from ctypes import wintypes

    shell32 = ctypes.WinDLL('shell32', use_last_error=True) 

    PLPWSTR = ctypes.POINTER(wintypes.LPWSTR)
    shell32.CommandLineToArgvW.restype = PLPWSTR

    def cmdline2argv(cmdline):
        argc = ctypes.c_int()
        pargv = shell32.CommandLineToArgvW(cmdline, ctypes.byref(argc))
        if not pargv:
            raise ctypes.WinError(ctypes.get_last_error())
        return pargv[:argc.value]

    def get_argv_delims():
        cmdline = 'test{}space'
        delims = []
        for space in space_chars:
            if len(cmdline2argv(cmdline.format(space))) > 1:
                delims.append(space)
        return delims


    >>> get_argv_delims()
    ['\t', '\n', '\x0b', '\x0c', '\r', '\x1c', '\x1d', '\x1e', '\x1f', ' ']

In addition to space and horizontal tab, CommandLineToArgvW also considers line 
feed, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return, file separator, group 
separator, record separator, and unit separator to be white-space delimiters. 
This disagrees with [1], which says it should be limited to space and 
horizontal tab, like CreateProcess. Let's test this as well:

    def get_msvc_argv_delims():
        template = '"{}" -c "import sys;print(len(sys.argv))" test{}space'
        delims = []
        for space in space_chars:
            cmdline = template.format(sys.executable, space)
            out = subprocess.check_output(cmdline)
            argc = int(out)
            if argc > 2:
                delims.append(space)
        return delims


    >>> get_msvc_argv_delims()
    ['\t', ' ']

Apparently CommandLineToArgvW is inconsistent with the C runtime in this case.

On my Windows 10 system, ideographic space (U+3000) is not generally a 
command-line delimiter. That's not to say that some applications (and maybe 
localized CRTs?) don't use it that way. But I don't think it's the place of the 
subprocess module to handle it.

[1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/17w5ykft

----------
nosy: +eryksun

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