How can I escape a double quote inside double quotes

Question

How can I escape double quotes inside a double string in Bash   For example  in my shell script     bin bash  dbload  load data local infile    gfpoint csv    into table  dbtable FIELDS TERMINATED BY     ENCLOSED BY      LINES TERMINATED BY     n    IGNORE 1 LINES    I can t get the ENCLOSED BY      with double quote to escape correctly  I can t use single quotes for my variable  because I want to use variable  dbtable

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Use a backslash   echo            Prints one   character

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Check out printf        bin bash mystr  say   hi      Without using printf  echo -e  mystr   Output  say  hi   Using printf  echo -e   printf   q   mystr    Output  say   hi

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Store the double quote character in a variable  dqt   quot   echo  quot Double quotes   dqt X  dqt  inside a double quoted string quot   Output  Double quotes  quot X quot  inside a double quoted string

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Add     before double quote to escape it  instead of        bin csh -f  set dbtable   balabala  set dbload    load data local infile      gfpoint csv      into table  dbtable FIELDS TERMINATED BY     ENCLOSED BY        LINES TERMINATED BY       n      IGNORE 1 LINES   echo  dbload   load data local infile   gfpoint csv   into table balabala FIELDS TERMINATED BY     ENCLOSED BY     LINES TERMINATED BY      IGNORE 1 LINES

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Make use of   string    In this example  it would be      dbload   load data local infile    gfpoint csv    into table  dbtable FIELDS TERMINATED BY     ENCLOSED BY      LINES TERMINATED BY     n    IGNORE 1 LINES    Note from the man page       A double-quoted string preceded by a dollar sign    string   will cause the string to be translated according to the current locale  If the current locale is C or POSIX  the dollar sign is ignored  If the string is translated and replaced  the replacement is double-quoted

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Bash allows you to place strings adjacently  and they ll just end up being glued together   So this     echo  Hello    world     produces    Hello  world      The trick is to alternate between single and double-quoted strings as required  Unfortunately  it quickly gets very messy  For example     echo  I like to use    double quotes    sometimes    produces    I like to use  double quotes  sometimes       In your example  I would do it something like this     dbtable example   dbload  load data local infile     gfpoint csv     into   table  dbtable FIELDS TERMINATED BY     ENCLOSED BY         LINES   TERMINATED BY      n     IGNORE 1 LINES    echo  dbload   which produces the following output     load data local infile   gfpoint csv   into table example FIELDS TERMINATED BY     ENCLOSED BY     LINES TERMINATED BY    n   IGNORE 1 LINES     It s difficult to see what s going on here  but I can annotate it using Unicode quotes  The following won t work in bash     it s just for illustration   dbload    load data local infile         gfpoint csv         into      table  dbtable FIELDS TERMINATED BY     ENCLOSED BY                 LINES      TERMINATED BY          n         IGNORE 1 LINES     The quotes like                 in the above will be interpreted by bash  The quotes like     will end up in the resulting variable   If I give the same treatment to the earlier example  it looks like this     echo   I like to use       double quotes       sometimes

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I don t know why this old issue popped up today in the Bash tagged listings  but just in case for future researchers  keep in mind that you can avoid escaping by using ASCII codes of the chars you need to echo   Example    echo -e  This is  x22 x27 x22 x27 x22text x22 x27 x22 x27 x22   This is      text         x22 is the ASCII code  in hex  for double quotes and  x27 for single quotes  Similarly you can echo any character   I suppose if we try to echo the above string with backslashes  we will need a messy two rows backslashed echo        For variable assignment this is the equivalent      a   This is  x22text x22     echo   a   This is  text    If the variable is already set by another program  you can still apply double single quotes with sed or similar tools   Example      b  Just another text here     echo   b   Just another text here    sed  s text    0      lt  lt  lt   b    0 is a special sed operator  Just another  0  here  this is not what i wanted to be    sed  s text  x22 x27 0 x27 x22    lt  lt  lt   b   Just another   text   here  now we are talking  You would normally need a dozen of backslashes to achieve the same result in the normal way

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A simple example of escaping quotes in the shell     echo  abc    abc  abc abc   echo  abc    abc  abc abc   It s done by finishing an already-opened one      placing the escaped one       and then opening another one       Alternatively     echo  abc     abc  abc abc   echo  abc     abc  abc abc   It s done by finishing already opened one      placing a quote in another quote        and then opening another one       More examples  Escaping single-quotes within single-quoted strings

[bash] How can I escape a double quote inside double quotes?

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