I have this multi-line string (quotes included):
abc'asdf"
$(dont-execute-this)
foo"bar"''
How would I assign it to a variable using a heredoc in Bash?
I need to preserve newlines.
I don't want to escape the characters in the string, that would be annoying...
You can avoid a useless use of cat
and handle mismatched quotes better with this:
$ read -r -d '' VAR <<'EOF'
abc'asdf"
$(dont-execute-this)
foo"bar"''
EOF
If you don't quote the variable when you echo it, newlines are lost. Quoting it preserves them:
$ echo "$VAR"
abc'asdf"
$(dont-execute-this)
foo"bar"''
If you want to use indentation for readability in the source code, use a dash after the less-thans. The indentation must be done using only tabs (no spaces).
$ read -r -d '' VAR <<-'EOF'
abc'asdf"
$(dont-execute-this)
foo"bar"''
EOF
$ echo "$VAR"
abc'asdf"
$(dont-execute-this)
foo"bar"''
If, instead, you want to preserve the tabs in the contents of the resulting variable, you need to remove tab from IFS
. The terminal marker for the here doc (EOF
) must not be indented.
$ IFS='' read -r -d '' VAR <<'EOF'
abc'asdf"
$(dont-execute-this)
foo"bar"''
EOF
$ echo "$VAR"
abc'asdf"
$(dont-execute-this)
foo"bar"''
Tabs can be inserted at the command line by pressing Ctrl-V Tab. If you are using an editor, depending on which one, that may also work or you may have to turn off the feature that automatically converts tabs to spaces.