Question

Given the following:

text="The quick $color fox jumps over the $adjective dog"

How can I echo $text with $color and $adjective values being colored in bash, but not changing the variable?

Example:

$ echo -e --highlight-variables $text
The quick \e[00;31mbrown\e[00m fox jumps over the \e[00;31mlazy\e[00m dog

(except with the actual colors)

But then:

$ echo -e $text
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

would have no color changes.

I want to be able to output the text with less so the user can review it in the console, but then write the variables to a file, but the file should not have the color info in it. The actual code I’m executing looks something like:

echo -e $text | less
echo "Is this acceptable?"
read accept
if [ "$accept" == "y" ]
  then
  echo -e $text > output.txt
fi

If I wrap the variables in color, the escaped text gets put in the file.

Answer 1

You just need to remove ansi sequences before you print.

nocolor()
{
perl -pe "s/\e\[\d+(?>(;\d+)*)m//g;"
}

echo -e $text | less
echo "Is this acceptable?"
read accept
if [ "$accept" == "y" ]
  then
  echo -e $text | nocolor > output.txt
fi