Any recommendations for a library that can do string escaping, other than

org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils

?

String escaping for what? Usually it comes with whatever you want to escape it for. For instance HTTP libraries likely have URL-encoding functions, markdown libraries for markdown escaping etc

Shell. I want to take a bunch of strings representing an executable and its arguments, of the form you would pass to

java.lang.ProcessBuilder(String... command)

, and print them in a form that could be passed to

sh -c

and would work. Single quotes around each string would mean replacing any single quotes in the string with

'\''

- that might be all that's needed

the

List<String>/vararg String

methods of

ProcessBuilder

pass arguments to the executable directly, without going through shell, which avoids the need for escaping. why do you need something to pass to

sh -c

?

@ephemient some commands are actually shell built-ins, which might be the reason why

sh -c

is needed

yeah there is no reliable quoting method on Windows since every program gets to interpret the command line in their own way…

For

toString

purposes, really - I want to represent it in a way that is easy for me to read & copy into an actual shell if I want to play with it.

@Joffrey there are very few shell builtins I'd expect to be called by non-shell users - the only one I can think of is

time

which exists as a separate executable on many systems anyway

This is naive, I presume I will shortly find a test that breaks it. Also there must be more efficient ways that multiple contains.

private fun String.escape() = if (contains(' ') || contains('\'')) {
  "'${replace("'", "'\\''")}'"
} else this

anything involving `#$&();<>?[\]`{|}~` is liable to be interpreted by the shell, and other whitespace characters such as

\t

are usually in

$IFS

too

Thanks, that's very helpful

if you want to see how Bash generates quoted representations of strings and have Bash 4.0+ (notably, not macos),

ProcessBuilder("/bin/bash", "-c", "echo \"\${@@Q}\"", "-s", "<\$hello>", "world!\n").start().inputReader().readLine()
// returns '<$hello>' $'world!\n'

but note that the

$''

syntax is Bash-specific