How to escape single quotes within single quoted strings

Question

Let\'s say, you have a Bash alias like:

alias rxvt=\'urxvt\'

which works fine.

However:

Answer 1

This function:

quote () 
{ 
    local quoted=${1//\'/\'\\\'\'};
    printf "'%s'" "$quoted"
}

allows quoting of ' inside '. Use as this:

$ quote "urxvt -fg '#111111' -bg '#111111'"
'urxvt -fg '\''#111111'\'' -bg '\''#111111'\'''

If the line to quote gets more complex, like double quotes mixed with single quotes, it may become quite tricky to get the string to quote inside a variable. When such cases show up, write the exact line that you need to quote inside an script (similar to this).

#!/bin/bash

quote ()
{
    local quoted=${1//\'/\'\\\'\'};
    printf "'%s'" "$quoted"
}

while read line; do
    quote "$line"
done <<-\_lines_to_quote_
urxvt -fg '#111111' -bg '#111111'
Louis Theroux's LA Stories
'single quote phrase' "double quote phrase"
_lines_to_quote_

Will output:

'urxvt -fg '\''#111111'\'' -bg '\''#111111'\'''
'Louis Theroux'\''s LA Stories'
''\''single quote phrase'\'' "double quote phrase"'

All correctly quoted strings inside single quotes.