Use Sed to Replace Each White Space with a Backslash
Just Want to Escape Spaces in Windows Filepath. I'm Trying This: Echo "111 1111 "| Sed -E "S/[[: Space:]]/\\ /G" That Only Match Spaces but Do Not Replace. 1 2...
Just want to escape spaces in windows filepath. I'm trying this:
echo "111 1111 "| sed -e "s/[[:space:]]/\\ /g"
that only match spaces but do not replace.
2 Answers
If you use double quotes, bash interprets \\ and outputs \ which is then again interpreted from sed together with the following space to just the space.
So you need one more backslash:
echo "111 1111 " | sed -e "s/[[:space:]]/\\\ /g"
but better to use single quotes to prevent the bash interpreting:
echo "111 1111 " | sed -e 's/[[:space:]]/\\ /g'
Output:
111\ \ 1111\
Alternative method:
If you have the file path as a variable, you can use Shell methods:
path="111 1111 "
echo ${path// /\\ }
[[:space:]] doesn’t match just spaces but rather all whitespace characters including tabs and line breaks. If you really want that, GNU sed (like in Ubuntu) has the shorthand class \s for it:
sed 's_\s_\\&_g'
This substitutes every (g) whitespace character (\s, matches spaces, tabs and newlines embedded in the pattern/hold spaces) in every line with a backslash (\\) and itself – & is the whole matched pattern. I use a different delimiter because slashes and backslashes always look confusing together; s/\s/\\&/g is of course valid as well.
If you want to replace only space characters, rather use:
sed 's_ _\\&_g'
Example run
$ echo "111 1111 " | sed 's_ _\\&_g'
111\ \ 1111\
For further reading on character classes see here on regular-expressions.info.
James Sterling reports on renewable energy developments, climate policy, ecological conservation, and green tech innovations around the globe.
