Question

So I have testfile which contains

Line one
Another line
and this is the third line

My script reads this file, does some stuff and I end up with a variable that should contain it. Kind of doing

filevar=$(cat testfile)

(the important thing here is that I cannot access the file directly).

I’ll be using the contents of that variable to generate an HTML code and one things I have to do is to add <br> to the end of each line. The problem is, there doesnt seem to any EOLs in my var:

echo $filevar
Line one Another line and this is the third line

How do I read the file properly to keep the EOLs? Once I have that I can simply sed s/$/<br>/g, but till then…

thanks!

Answer 1

Instead of doing echo $filevar do echo "$filevar" (note the double quotes). This will send a single argument to echo and then you can pipe this to sed.

With sed, this will be treated as 3 lines, so you do not need the g option. This works with me (bash and cygwin):

echo "$filevar" | sed 's/$/<br>/'