Command prompt not shown when running Python script with subprocess on Windows

[ps16thypresenceisfullnessofjoy at gmail.com]

That's interesting, now I learned something else too. As I said before, though, I want users to be able to enter paths in the XML file exactly the way they would be entered in a Windows shortcut.
(Actually, my program currently only has one Windows user, for whom I develop it [I don't even use it myself :-0].)

Since in a Windows shortcut you don't need to put quotes around a path that doesn't contain spaces, I want to follow that behavior in my program as well.

So actually, I see that the line:

<app name="LibreOffice Writer">"%ProgramFiles%\LibreOffice 4\program\swriter.exe" "C:\Users\Timothy\Documents\myfile.odt"</app>

should instead be:

<app name="LibreOffice Writer">"%ProgramFiles%\LibreOffice 4\program\swriter.exe" C:\Users\Timothy\Documents\myfile.odt</app>

because there are no spaces in the second path, but there is a space in the first one.

So I guess I'll still have to do my "shlex dance" (which for some reason I keep on mistyping as "shlex dane" :-)) unless I can learn a better way to do it.

Also, is my calling os.path.expandvars only on the first argument a good idea? I want to accept environment variables in my program, but I don't want to call os.path.expandvars on all the arguments, because I want to let other programs take care of parsing their own arguments.

I'm just wondering if I should relook at the whole way that I am doing things here. Maybe it would be better to just use shlex.split and subprocess.Popen and not try to follow the behavior of Windows shortcuts so closely? (But then it might be hard for some Windows users to understand how to use the program if I didn't.) What do you think?