Tool for escaping all quotes in a string/file

Question

I have a weird problem that I don't have a good way around.

My company, because reasons, stores scripting code in a database table. Don't ask. Whenever I have to insert a new version of the code, I have to go through the file and manually backslash all the strings to be able to run it in my insert statement.

Is there a tool which will escape all of the strings in the file for me so that I can just copy and paste without having to do this manual work?

The file will likely contain single and double quotes as well as quotes within quotes, ie "this is \"weird\"".

Here's an example of the query I'm running:

delimiter $$
insert into table (code) values ("package a.b.c; 
class SomeClass {
    var thing = "so \"weird\" and thing's stuff"

}");

I don't need spaces escaped, nor semicolons, but anything that would break my quotes should be escaped. The contents of the thing variable would break my quoting in the example given above.

Answer 1

If you only want to escape every double quotation mark and backslash you could use

perl -wpe 's/([\\"])/\\$1/g'

You could also use this with xclip:

cat myfile | perl -wpe 's/([\\"])/\\$1/g' | xclip -selection clipboard

Answer 2

POSIXly you can safely escape any string into one concatenated string for reinput to the shell like:

alias "string=$(cat file)"; alias string

alias will hard-quote its output and prepend (at least) string= to head of the string. bash (in a break with the standard) also adds the string alias to head of the output. Still, you can get an eval-friendly quoted version of any string like:

string=$(alias "string=$(cat file)"; alias string)
string=${string#*=}

Or, to get it into your clipboard:

<infile sh -c 'alias "c=$(cat)" c' | sed 1s/..// | xsel -bi 

Answer 3

bash:

> printf %q "this is \"weird\""
this\ is\ \"weird\"

> printf -v var %q "this is \"weird\""
> echo $var
this\ is\ \"weird\"

Answer 4

Oracle, mysql and sqlite all have quote function. var thing = quote("so \"weird\" and thing's stuff") may work.

It seems code is transformed one way. It's very difficult to reverse if only single and double quotes are escaped by backslash because we wouldn't know which one to remove.
A better way that can perform bidirectional transformation of plain as well as binary in safe way is base64 encoding.

echo \'\"\' \"\'\" \\
'"' "'" \
echo \'\"\' \"\'\" \\ | base64
JyInICInIiBcCg==
echo JyInICInIiBcCg== | base64 -d
'"' "'" \  

can be compressed to save space.

wc -c  /usr/bin/bashbug
6957
gzip < /usr/bin/bashbug | base64 |wc -c
4094