Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

String replacement in BASH scripting

28th April 2023

During creation of new posts for a Hugo deployed website, I found myself using the same directories again and again. Since I invariably ended up making typing mistakes when I did so, I fancied the idea of using shortcodes instead.

Because I wanted to turn the shortcode into the actual directory name, I chose the use of text replacement in BASH scripting. Thankfully, this is simple and avoids the use of regular expressions, which can bring their own problems. The essential syntax is as follows:

variable="${variable/search text/replacement}"

For the variable, the search text is substituted with the replacement very easily. It is even possible to include the search and replacement text in variables. In the example below, this is achieved using variables called original and replacement.

variable="${variable/$original/$replacement}"

Doing this got me my translatable shortcodes and converted them into actual directory names for the hugo command to process. There may be other uses yet.

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