Cannot use ${{ toJson(github) }} when a ' appears in the commit message.

Describe the bug When trying to use ${{ toJson(github) }} when there is a ’ in the commit message, you get an error. The error looks like, unexpected EOF while looking for matching `"’

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Have a workflow bash script that tries to run ${{ toJson(github) }} that runs on a PR
2. Leave a commit message including a ’ character
3. Trigger the workflow by opening a PR
4. You should see the toJson step fail with the error message above.

Expected behavior Expected to see the full pretty printed github context

Runner Version and Platform

Current runner version: ‘2.287.1’

OS of the machine running the runner? OSX/Windows/Linux/… Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS

What’s not working?

toJson expression

Job Log Output

unexpected EOF while looking for matching `"’

[nikola-jokic]

Hi @petersutter5,

I reproduced the issue. toJSON will create a JSON object, and since ’ is a valid thing to be inside the name (strings are enclosed using "), it will not be escaped. Now, if you are using an expression like echo '${{ toJSON(github) }}', it will trigger a parsing error when it gets to the ’ inside the "title".

One suggestion can be to pass in the context as env variable, and then printing or using it would not cause an issue:

jobs: 
  build:
    runs-on: [ ubuntu-latest ]
    steps:
      - name: Dump GitHub context
        id: github_context_step
        run: echo $JSON
        env:
          JSON: ${{ toJSON(github) }}

This is a bash error, and you can take advantage of bash’s built-in escaping of env variables to solve the problem like in the workflow above.

[atsu85]

@nikola-jokic , thanks for the workaround, but note that official documentation also contains example that triggers this issue, without warning about escaping issues It would be nice to add second warning there about this issue and potential workaround