Do zsh or bash have quotes that are convenient for English text?

Question

If I use single quotes, words with apostrophes ("don't") are annoying to escape:

'Don'"'"'t do that'

If I use double quotes, dollar signs and exclamation points trip it up:

"It cost like \$1000\!"

Is there another kind of quoting I can use?

edit: I should also add that I would like to pass this string directly as a command line argument, rather than storing it in a variable. To this end I tried, using DigitalRoss's solution,

$ echo "$(cat << \EOF 
Don't $worry be "happy".
EOF)"

but get

dquote cmdsubst>

after hitting enter :/ . So at this point ZyX's suggestion of setopt rcquotes looks to be the most convenient.

the last `EOF` needs to be on a line by itself, no other characters. Put the close parenthesis on the next line. — glenn jackman, Oct 15 '12 at 01:36
Hmm, the shell is waiting for the single quote to be matched. — glenn jackman, Oct 16 '12 at 13:25

ZyX · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-15T16:34:07.960

With zsh you may do

setopt rcquotes

. Then ASCII apostrophes are escaped just like this:

echo 'Don''t'

. Or setup your keymap to be able to enter UTF apostrophes, they have no issues with any kind of quotes (including none) in any shell:

echo 'Don’t'

. Third works both for zsh and bash:

echo $'Don\'t'

.

Neither first nor third can narrow down quote to a single character, but they are still less verbose for non-lengthy strings then heredocs suggested above. With zsh you can do this by using custom accept-line widget that will replace constructs like 'Don't' with 'Don'\''t'. Requires rather tricky regex magic that I can write only in perl; and is probably not the best idea as I can’t pretend I can cover all possible cases before they will hit. It won’t in any case touch any scripts.

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:10

4

I like the direction Zsolt Botykai is going. Here is an example that works with any Posix shell. (I also verified that it survived its paste into the SO server.)

$ read -r x << \EOF
Don't $worry be "happy".
EOF
$ echo $x
Don't $worry be "happy".

The things that make this work;

-r will make \ not be magic
the \EOF instead of just EOF makes $ not be magic

edited May 23 '17 at 12:10

Community

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answered Oct 14 '12 at 18:19

DigitalRoss

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Note that unless you remove them from `$IFS`, leading and trailing blanks will be stripped. Also, it only works for single-line text. – Stephane Chazelas Oct 14 '12 at 20:45
I believe if you single quote `'EOF'`, it has the effect of single-quoting the whole text: `read -r x << 'EOF'` – glenn jackman Oct 15 '12 at 01:35

Zsolt Botykai · Answer 3 · 2012-10-15T10:41:45.923

3

If you want to assign a quoted text to a variable, you still can use heredocs, like (and it can be a multiline text too):

read -r -d '' VAR <<'ENDOFVAR'
This "will be" a 'really well' escaped text. Or won't.
ENDOFVAR

edited Oct 15 '12 at 10:41

answered Oct 14 '12 at 18:06

Zsolt Botykai

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 28 '18 at 12:50

Bash syntax $'string' is another quoting mechanism which allows ANSI C-like escape sequences and do expansion to single-quoted version.

$> echo $'Don\'t $worry be "happy".'
Don't $worry be "happy".

See https://stackoverflow.com/a/16605140/149221 for more details.

Do zsh or bash have quotes that are convenient for English text?

4 Answers4