Question

I’m trying write a script in awk that (among other things) replaces all instances of double quotes with two consecutive double quotes. But for some reason, I can’t seem to escape my double quotes properly.

So for instance:

Mary had a "little" lamb

would become

Mary had a ""little"" lamb

Thanks kindly!

Answer 1

You can do it like this:

echo 'Mary had a "little" lamb' | awk '{ gsub(/"/, "&&") } 1' 

Output:

Mary had a ""little"" lamb

The 1 at the end invokes awk’s default block { print $0 }.

It’s even shorter with sed:

echo 'Mary had a "little" lamb' | sed 's/"/&&/g'