Process Escape Characters in Release body

My use case: I'm using an environment variable to pass a parsed sub-section of my changelog into the release body.

The environment variable is defined in a previous step using https://help.github.com/en/actions/automating-your-workflow-with-github-actions/development-tools-for-github-actions#set-an-environment-variable-set-env. From what I can tell, this logging command does not work with multi-line environment variables unless the newlines are escaped, so I replaced the newline character with the ascii characters \n. This environment variable can be passed successfully to further steps, and echo -e $CHANGELOG processes the escaped characters and shows newlines as expected.

But when passing body: ${{ env.CHANGELOG }} to actions/create-release, the created release shows ascii \n characters instead of newlines. Would it be possible to process escape characters in the body the same way echo -e does? If this isn't desired as default behaviour, could an input be added to specify this?

Thanks :)

I found out that you can set outputs with newlines, if you replace newlines with the literal characters %0A

e.g., echo "::set-output name=my_output::hello%0Aworld%0A!"

Presumably also works with ::set-env although I haven't tried

Here is the workaround I'm using now:

text="${text//'%'/'%25'}"
text="${text//$'\n'/'%0A'}"
text="${text//$'\r'/'%0D'}"
echo "::set-output name=value::$text"

And using master

- name: Create ${{ steps.tag.outputs.value }} release
  id: create_release
  uses: actions/create-release@master
  env:
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} 
  with:
     tag_name: ${{ github.ref }}
     release_name: ${{ steps.tag.outputs.value }}
     body: |
       ${{ steps.release_notes.outputs.value }}
     draft: true
     prerelease: false

Adjust "\n" handling

So my script generates a table of metrics for my bachelor thesis:

Relevant code

def print_result(analysis_result: Dict[str, Any]) -> None:
    data = sorted([(k, v) for k, v in analysis_result.items()])
    to_print = "### Metrics\n" + tabulate.tabulate(data, tablefmt="github")
    # use newline char for url encoding instead of standard one
    # to get multiline output shown in release body
    to_print = to_print.replace('\n', '%0A')
    print(to_print)

Output (standard output)

'### Metrics%0A|------------|-----|%0A| citations | 3 |%0A| figures | 0 |%0A| pages | 30 |%0A| tables | 0 |%0A| word_count | 510 |'

In the CI job console, the table is shown correctly:

However, in the release, the table becomes malformed like these:

Can someone help me out finding the problem here?

Nevermind, the problem is that multiple continous whitespace characters are replaced by one in HTML (and thus Markdown rendering). So I ended up adding fenced code blocks characters.

@walfie

Thanks @walfie and @trung! I found that I had to tweak the search and replace a little, so I ended up with:

text="${text//$'%'/%25}"
text="${text//$'\n'/%0A}"
text="${text//$'\r'/%0D}"
echo "::set-env name=value::$text"

Also I can confirm it works with ::set-env as expected.

fix(release): newline bug fix

Navigation Menu

Repository navigation

Process Escape Characters in Release `body` #25

Relevant code

Output (standard output)

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

Process Escape Characters in Release body #25

Description

Activity

walfie commented on Nov 27, 2019

trung commented on Dec 6, 2019

nazarimilad commented on Dec 27, 2019

Relevant code

Output (standard output)

nazarimilad commented on Dec 27, 2019

nathanielatom commented on Jan 17, 2020

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

Issue actions

Process Escape Characters in Release `body` #25