Bash - how to put each line within quotation
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Bash - how to put each line within quotation
I want to put each line within quotation marks, such as:
abcdefg
hijklmn
opqrst
convert to:
"abcdefg"
"hijklmn"
"opqrst"
How to do this in Bash shell script?
Also, an awful lot of people seem to want to do this for the wrong reasons. If you have a program which requires its arguments to be in quotes, like
./tool "example sentence one" "example sentence two", the quotes are consumed by the shell, and not part of the data itself. If you have those values in variables, the variables should not contain the quotes, but you need to quote the interpolation; ./tool "$sentence1" "$sentence2"– tripleee
Jun 20 '16 at 4:30
./tool "example sentence one" "example sentence two"
./tool "$sentence1" "$sentence2"
7 Answers
7
Using awk
awk ' print """$0"""' inputfile
Using pure bash
while read FOO; do
echo -e ""$FOO""
done < inputfile
where inputfile would be a file containing the lines without quotes.
inputfile
If your file has empty lines, awk is definitely the way to go:
awk 'NF print """$0"""' inputfile
NF tells awk to only execute the print command when the Number of Fields is more than zero (line is not empty).
NF
awk
for the
read solution, you need IFS= read -r FOO. Otherwise you'll lose whitespace at the beginning of lines and backslash-escapes my be lost– glenn jackman
Jun 7 '13 at 19:24
read
IFS= read -r FOO
Or lose the
FOO and use the implicit $REPLY name. Just do while read; do printf '"%s"n' "$REPLY"; done < inputfile– kojiro
Jun 7 '13 at 19:28
FOO
$REPLY
while read; do printf '"%s"n' "$REPLY"; done < inputfile
all more reasons to go with
awk as I see it :D– blue
Jun 7 '13 at 19:29
awk
@kojiro, when relying on REPLY, you still need
read -r– glenn jackman
Jun 7 '13 at 19:32
read -r
@glennjackman sure, if you actually want to retain backslash escapes.
– kojiro
Jun 7 '13 at 19:38
I use the following command:
xargs -Ilin echo "lin" < your_filename
The xargs take standard input (redirected from your file) and pass one line a time to lin placeholder, and then execute the command at next, in this case a echo with escaped double quotes.
xargs
lin
echo
You can use the -i option of xargs to omit the name of the placeholder, like this:
-i
xargs -i echo "" < your_filename
In both cases, your IFS must be at default value or with 'n' at least.
'n'
Consider also, that one might not really need to echo the thing, but one might have needed quote-marks to do other operations in the script. For me, I can run a command: script-that-lists-files-per-line.py | xargs -Ilin sudo chmod a+r lin
– macetw
Jun 16 '17 at 13:42
You're right Mr. macetw, my mistake not put clear that's just an command example.
– 0zkr PM
Feb 21 at 23:58
Use sed:
sed -e 's/^|$/"/g' file
More effort needed if the file contains empty lines.
I tried this and discovered that, for some reason, on blank lines it only output one quote.
– glenn jackman
Jun 7 '13 at 19:23
Could do
sed 's/.*/"&"/'– glenn jackman
Jun 7 '13 at 19:25
sed 's/.*/"&"/'
@glennjackman: Yes. If the line is empty, there is only one position when the substitution can be tried.
– choroba
Jun 7 '13 at 19:27
sed 's/^/"/; s/$/"/' file, assuming no line is already quoted.
– michael
Jun 7 '13 at 19:29
This sed should work for ignoring empty lines as well:
sed -i.bak 's/^..*$/"&"/' inFile
or
sed 's/^.1,$/"&"/' inFile
I think the sed and awk are the best solution but if you want to use just shell here is small script for you.
#!/bin/bash
chr="""
file="file.txt"
cp $file $file."_backup"
while read -r line
do
echo "$chr$line$chr"
done <$file > newfile
mv newfile $file
it would be nice to at least provide some explanation as why you feel this is incorrect.
– CPU 100
Jun 7 '13 at 19:40
Other than showing how to output a literal double quotation mark, it does not address the topic of adding quotation marks to preexisting text at all.
– chepner
Jun 7 '13 at 19:43
@ chepner I have modified my comment and thanks for giving me a feedback so I can contribute more effectively.
– CPU 100
Jun 7 '13 at 19:55
+1 Much, much improved.
– chepner
Jun 7 '13 at 20:32
paste -d" /dev/null your-file /dev/null
(not the nicest looking, but probably the fastest)
Now, if the input may contain quotes, you may need to escape them with backslashes (and then escape backslashes as well) like:
sed 's/["]/\&/g; s/.*/"&"/' your-file
I used sed with two expressions to replace start and end of line, since in my particular use case I wanted to place HTML tags around only lines that contained particular words.
So I searched for the lines containing words contained in the bla variable within the text file inputfile and replaced the beginnign with <P> and the end with </P> (well actually I did some longer HTML tagging in the real thing, but this will serve fine as example)
bla
inputfile
<P>
</P>
Similar to:
$ bla=foo
$ sed -e "/$bla/s#^#<P>#" -e "/$bla/s#$#</P>#" inputfile
<P>foo</P>
bar
$
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– Jonathan Leffler
Jun 7 '13 at 21:20