How to Escape Single Quotes Within Single Quoted Strings

I always just replace each embedded single quote with the sequence: '\'' (that is: quote backslash quote quote) which closes the string, appends an escaped single quote and reopens the string.

I often whip up a "quotify" function in my Perl scripts to do this for me. The steps would be:

s/'/'\\''/g    # Handle each embedded quote
$_ = qq['$_']; # Surround result with single quotes.

This pretty much takes care of all cases.

Life gets more fun when you introduce eval into your shell-scripts. You essentially have to re-quotify everything again!

For example, create a Perl script called quotify containing the above statements:

#!/usr/bin/perl -pl
s/'/'\\''/g;
$_ = qq['$_'];

then use it to generate a correctly-quoted string:

$ quotify
urxvt -fg '#111111' -bg '#111111'

result:

'urxvt -fg '\''#111111'\'' -bg '\''#111111'\'''

which can then be copy/pasted into the alias command:

alias rxvt='urxvt -fg '\''#111111'\'' -bg '\''#111111'\'''

(If you need to insert the command into an eval, run the quotify again:

 $ quotify
 alias rxvt='urxvt -fg '\''#111111'\'' -bg '\''#111111'\'''

result:

'alias rxvt='\''urxvt -fg '\''\'\'''\''#111111'\''\'\'''\'' -bg '\''\'\'''\''#111111'\''\'\'''\'''\'''

which can be copy/pasted into an eval:

eval 'alias rxvt='\''urxvt -fg '\''\'\'''\''#111111'\''\'\'''\'' -bg '\''\'\'''\''#111111'\''\'\'''\'''\'''

Since Bash 2.04 syntax $'string' allows a limit set of escapes.

Since Bash 4.4, $'string' also allows the full set of C-style escapes, making the behavior differ slightly in $'string' in previous versions. (Previously the $('string') form could be used.)

Simple example in Bash 2.04 and newer:

  $> echo $'aa\'bb'
  aa'bb

  $> alias myvar=$'aa\'bb'
  $> alias myvar
  alias myvar='aa'\''bb'

In your case:

$> alias rxvt=$'urxvt -fg \'#111111\' -bg \'#111111\''
$> alias rxvt
alias rxvt='urxvt -fg '\''#111111'\'' -bg '\''#111111'\'''

Common escaping sequences works as expected:

\'     single quote
\"     double quote
\\     backslash
\n     new line
\t     horizontal tab
\r     carriage return

Below is copy+pasted related documentation from man bash (version 4.4):

Words of the form $'string' are treated specially. The word expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard. Backslash escape sequences, if present, are decoded as follows:

    \a     alert (bell)
    \b     backspace
    \e
    \E     an escape character
    \f     form feed
    \n     new line
    \r     carriage return
    \t     horizontal tab
    \v     vertical tab
    \\     backslash
    \'     single quote
    \"     double quote
    \?     question mark
    \nnn   the eight-bit character whose value is the octal 
           value nnn (one to three digits)
    \xHH   the eight-bit character whose value is the hexadecimal
           value HH (one or two hex digits)
    \uHHHH the Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646) character whose value is 
           the hexadecimal value HHHH (one to four hex digits)
    \UHHHHHHHH the Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646) character whose value 
               is the hexadecimal value HHHHHHHH (one to eight 
               hex digits)
    \cx    a control-x character

The expanded result is single-quoted, as if the dollar sign had not been present.

See Quotes and escaping: ANSI C like strings on bash-hackers.org wiki for more details. Also note that "Bash Changes" file (overview here) mentions a lot for changes and bug fixes related to the $'string' quoting mechanism.

According to unix.stackexchange.com How to use a special character as a normal one? it should work (with some variations) in bash, zsh, mksh, ksh93 and FreeBSD and busybox sh.

I don't see the entry on his blog (link pls?) but according to the gnu reference manual:

Enclosing characters in single quotes (‘'’) preserves the literal value of each character within the quotes. A single quote may not occur between single quotes, even when preceded by a backslash.

so bash won't understand:

alias x='y \'z '

however, you can do this if you surround with double quotes:

alias x="echo \'y "
> x
> 'y

I can confirm that using '\'' for a single quote inside a single-quoted string does work in Bash, and it can be explained in the same way as the "gluing" argument from earlier in the thread. Suppose we have a quoted string: 'A '\''B'\'' C' (all quotes here are single quotes). If it is passed to echo, it prints the following: A 'B' C. In each '\'' the first quote closes the current single-quoted string, the following \' glues a single quote to the previous string (\' is a way to specify a single quote without starting a quoted string), and the last quote opens another single-quoted string.

Both versions are working, either with concatenation by using the escaped single quote character (\'), or with concatenation by enclosing the single quote character within double quotes ("'").

The author of the question did not notice that there was an extra single quote (') at the end of his last escaping attempt:

alias rxvt='urxvt -fg'\''#111111'\'' -bg '\''#111111'\''
           │         │┊┊|       │┊┊│     │┊┊│       │┊┊│
           └─STRING──┘┊┊└─STRIN─┘┊┊└─STR─┘┊┊└─STRIN─┘┊┊│
                      ┊┊         ┊┊       ┊┊         ┊┊│
                      ┊┊         ┊┊       ┊┊         ┊┊│
                      └┴─────────┴┴───┰───┴┴─────────┴┘│
                          All escaped single quotes    │
                                                       │
                                                       ?

As you can see in the previous nice piece of ASCII/Unicode art, the last escaped single quote (\') is followed by an unnecessary single quote ('). Using a syntax-highlighter like the one present in Notepad++ can prove very helpful.

The same is true for another example like the following one:

alias rc='sed '"'"':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/, /g'"'"
alias rc='sed '\'':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/, /g'\'

These two beautiful instances of aliases show in a very intricate and obfuscated way how a file can be lined down. That is, from a file with a lot of lines you get only one line with commas and spaces between the contents of the previous lines. In order to make sense of the previous comment, the following is an example:

$ cat Little_Commas.TXT
201737194
201802699
201835214

$ rc Little_Commas.TXT
201737194, 201802699, 201835214

Simple example of escaping quotes in shell:

$ echo 'abc'\''abc'
abc'abc
$ echo "abc"\""abc"
abc"abc

It's done by finishing already opened one ('), placing escaped one (\'), then opening another one ('). This syntax works for all commands. It's very similar approach to the 1st answer.

I'm not specifically addressing the quoting issue because, well, sometimes, it's just reasonable to consider an alternative approach.

rxvt() { urxvt -fg "#${1:-000000}" -bg "#${2:-FFFFFF}"; }

which you can then call as:

rxvt 123456 654321

the idea being that you can now alias this without concern for quotes:

alias rxvt='rxvt 123456 654321'

or, if you need to include the # in all calls for some reason:

rxvt() { urxvt -fg "${1:-#000000}" -bg "${2:-#FFFFFF}"; }

which you can then call as:

rxvt '#123456' '#654321'

then, of course, an alias is:

alias rxvt="rxvt '#123456' '#654321'"

(oops, i guess i kind of did address the quoting :)

I just use shell codes.. e.g. \x27 or \\x22 as applicable. No hassle, ever really.

Since one cannot put single quotes within single quoted strings, the simplest and most readable option is to use a HEREDOC string

command=$(cat <<'COMMAND'
urxvt -fg '#111111' -bg '#111111'
COMMAND
)

alias rxvt=$command

In the code above, the HEREDOC is sent to the cat command and the output of that is assigned to a variable via the command substitution notation $(..)

Putting a single quote around the HEREDOC is needed since it is within a $()

How to escape single quotes (') and double quotes (") with hex and octal chars

If using something like echo, I've had some really complicated and really weird and hard-to-escape (think: very nested) cases where the only thing I could get to work was using octal or hex codes!

Here are some basic examples just to demonstrate how it works:

1. Single quote example, where ' is escaped with hex \x27 or octal \047 (its corresponding ASCII code):

1. hex \x27

   echo -e "Let\x27s get coding!"
   # OR
   echo -e 'Let\x27s get coding!'
   

   Result:

   Let's get coding!
   

2. octal \047

   echo -e "Let\047s get coding!"
   # OR
   echo -e 'Let\047s get coding!'
   

   Result:

   Let's get coding!
   

2. Double quote example, where " is escaped with hex \x22 or octal \042 (its corresponding ASCII code).

Note: bash is nuts! Sometimes even the ! char has special meaning, and must either be removed from within the double quotes and then escaped "like this"\! or put entirely within single quotes 'like this!', rather than within double quotes.

# 1. hex; also escape `!` by removing it from within the double quotes 
# and escaping it with `\!`
$ echo -e "She said, \x22Let\x27s get coding"\!"\x22"
She said, "Let's get coding!"

# OR put it all within single quotes:
$ echo -e 'She said, \x22Let\x27s get coding!\x22'
She said, "Let's get coding!"


# 2. octal; also escape `!` by removing it from within the double quotes 
$ echo -e "She said, \042Let\047s get coding"\!"\042"
She said, "Let's get coding!"

# OR put it all within single quotes:
$ echo -e 'She said, \042Let\047s get coding!\042'
She said, "Let's get coding!"


# 3. mixed hex and octal, just for fun
# also escape `!` by removing it from within the double quotes when it is followed by
# another escape sequence
$ echo -e "She said, \x22Let\047s get coding! It\x27s waaay past time to begin"\!"\042"
She said, "Let's get coding! It's waaay past time to begin!"

# OR put it all within single quotes:
$ echo -e 'She said, \x22Let\047s get coding! It\x27s waaay past time to begin!\042'
She said, "Let's get coding! It's waaay past time to begin!"

Note that if you don't properly escape !, when needed, as I've shown two ways to do above, you'll get some weird errors, like this:

$ echo -e "She said, \x22Let\047s get coding! It\x27s waaay past time to begin!\042"
bash: !\042: event not found

OR:

$ echo -e "She said, \x22Let\x27s get coding!\x22"
bash: !\x22: event not found