Question

I’m using git, then posting the commit message and other bits as a JSON payload to a server.

Currently I have:

MSG=`git log -n 1 --format=oneline | grep -o ' .\+'`

which sets MSG to something like:

Calendar can't go back past today

then

curl -i -X POST \
  -H 'Accept: application/text' \
  -H 'Content-type: application/json' \
  -d "{'payload': {'message': '$MSG'}}" \
  'https://example.com'

My real JSON has another couple of fields.

This works fine, but of course when I have a commit message such as the one above with an apostrophe in it, the JSON is invalid.

How can I escape the characters required in bash? I’m not familiar with the language, so am not sure where to start. Replacing ' with \' would do the job at minimum I suspect.

Answer 1

OK, found out what to do. Bash supports this natively as expected, though as always, the syntax isn’t really very guessable!

Essentially ${string//substring/replacement} returns what you’d image, so you can use

MSG=${MSG//\'/\\\'}

To do this. The next problem is that the first regex doesn’t work anymore, but that can be replaced with

git log -n 1 --pretty=format:'%s'

In the end, I didn’t even need to escape them. Instead, I just swapped all the ‘ in the JSON to \”. Well, you learn something every day.