Export .env with special characters

Question

I am using set -o allexport; source .env; set +o allexport to export all variables from a .env file. Unfortunately, one variable contains ) for which reason it results in a syntax error. Is there a solution to this with the above command? I know it would be possible setting it in parentheses, but the .env is somewhat autogenerated without parentheses.

Dotenv looks like this for example:

username=test
password=*fdas_dfar+)mbn

Answer 1

source .env

source is a shell command and the .env file is parsed as shell file. You need to quote your strings, just as you would in shell.

username=test
password='*fdas_dfar+)mbn'

What is good about it, you can run all shell commands from such file:

username=$(echo test)
password='*fdas_dfar+)mbn'

Or you can write your own parser, ex:

while IFS='=' read -r name value; do
       if [ -z "$value" -o -z "$name" ]; then
           echo "Error - unparsable line!" >&2
           exit 1
       fi

       # add quotes around `'`
       value=$(<<<"$value" sed "s/'/'\''/g")
       
       # set the variable value using bash special builtin
       printf -v "$name" "%s" "$value"

 done <.env

Answer 2

If you want to be able to source .env then it needs to be valid shell syntax. That means quoting values that contain shell metachars like ). If that isn't possible because the file also needs to be read by other programs that can't handle the quoting then you will need to read and parse it one line at a time. Do not use eval as suggested in the older answer. The eval command almost always causes more problems than it solves. I prefer this approach over using the IFS trick because IFS is itself inherently dangerous and should always be set to IFS=$'\n' at the top of every script and not subsequently changed:

while read -r line
do
    # Insert appropriate checks for malformed input or comments here.
    key="${line%%=*}"
    val="${line#*=}"
    export "$key"="$val"
done < .env

But if you know the input is well formed and you like living dangerously then this also works fine:

while IFS='=' read -r key val
do
    export "$key"="$val"
done < .env