On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 05:10:40PM +0100, John Kearney wrote: > so for the test case the goal is to take a string like > kljlksdjflsd'jkjkljl > wrap it with single quotes and globally replace all single quotes in the > string with '\''
Is this an SQL thing? Maybe you'd be better off using a language that has an actual interface for database queries, including prepared statements with variables and so on. But if you insist: imadev:~$ q=\' imadev:~$ input="kljlksdjflsd'jkjkljl" imadev:~$ echo "'${input//$q/$q\\$q$q}'" 'kljlksdjflsd'\''jkjkljl'