I am working on a wit.ai project and I want the user to be able to type a query/request in plain human readable text (e.g "Turn on the lights") and the program will convert it to a formatted version designed to be put in a curl request (e.g "Turn%20on%20the%20lights").
How would I for example turn "Stack Exchange" into "Stack%20Exchange" using tools in bash?
Not really a basic shell tool but I've used jq for the job:
$ echo -n "Stack exchange" | jq -sRr @uri
Stack%20exchange%0A
To get rid of the %0A use echo -n, naturally.
read -e a # read from the keyboard interactively into the variable `a`
sed 's/ /%20/g' <<<$a # replace spaces to "$20" in `a` with the command `sed` and print it
or
echo $a |sed 's/ /%20/g'
If you want to put it into a variable:
b=$(sed 's/ /%20/g' <<<$a)
