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

User · Answer

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”

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Use a backslash   echo            Prints one   character

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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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