Bash Scripting – How to Escape a Single Quote in a Single-Quote String in Bash

bashescapinglinux

I want to display a string in Bash like this:

I'm a student

Of course you can do it like this:

echo "I'm a student"

But how can I accomplish this while using single quotes around the string?

Best Answer

echo 'I\'m a student'

does not work. But the following works:

echo $'I\'m a student'

From the man page of Bash:

A single quote may not occur between single quotes, even when preceded by a backslash.
....
Words of the form $'string' are treated specially. The word expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard.

Related Solutions

Bash Syntax – How to Escape Single Quotes Within Single Quoted Strings

If you really want to use single quotes in the outermost layer, remember that you can glue both kinds of quotation. Example:

 alias rxvt='urxvt -fg '"'"'#111111'"'"' -bg '"'"'#111111'"'"
 #                     ^^^^^       ^^^^^     ^^^^^       ^^^^
 #                     12345       12345     12345       1234

Explanation of how '"'"' is interpreted as just ':

' End first quotation which uses single quotes.
" Start second quotation, using double-quotes.
' Quoted character.
" End second quotation, using double-quotes.
' Start third quotation, using single quotes.

If you do not place any whitespaces between (1) and (2), or between (4) and (5), the shell will interpret that string as a one long word:

$ echo 'abc''123'  
abc123
$ echo 'abc'\''123'
abc'123
$ echo 'abc'"'"'123'
abc'123

It will also keep the internal representation with 'to be joined' strings, and will also prefer the shorter escape syntax when possible:

$ alias test='echo '"'"'hi'"'"
$ alias test
alias test='echo '\''hi'\'''
$ test
hi

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash Syntax – How to Escape Single Quotes Within Single Quoted Strings

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