How to put text in quotes? (Get the value of the Set-Cookie header in quotes)

Question

I have the following command which gives me value of Set-Cookie header:

curl --head http://www.stackoverflow.com | sed -n "/^Set-Cookie:/p" | cut -c 13-

Output:

prov=abed7528-7639-e2e3-39a0-361a6d3f7925; domain=.stackoverflow.com; expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2055 00:00:00 GMT; path=/; HttpOnly

I need this output in quotes, like this:

"prov=abed7528-7639-e2e3-39a0-361a6d3f7925; domain=.stackoverflow.com; expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2055 00:00:00 GMT; path=/; HttpOnly"

Answer 1

Using printf

printf '"%s"\n' "$(curl ...)"

Command substitution strips any trailing newlines, so the ending quote will be on the same line.

However, there is a trailing carriage return (network traffic generally uses \r\n line endings). Add this to the end of the pipeline

| tr -d '\r'
# or
| sed 's/\r$//'

---

Collapsing the pipeline into one sed command:

curl -s --head http://www.stackoverflow.com | sed -En '/^Set-Cookie:/ {
    s/^.{12}/"/
    s/\r$/"/
    p
    q
}'

Answer 2

If your input is a single line, piping it into sed 's/\(.*\)/"\1"/' should do the trick.

If your text spans multiple lines, this won’t do, but the following would work:

… | { printf \"; cat; echo \"; }

… however, this will preserve all newlines, which might also not be desirable. To suppress the very last newline, use the following instead:

… | { printf \"; sed '$s/$/"/'; }

Or, as a single sed command:

… | sed '1s/^/"/; $s/$/"/'