CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpbashsed
steven
steven

Reputation: 518

Double quotes keep getting parsed in PHP's shell_exec and sed

I've spent hours trying to figure this out. I am using shell_exec (yes, I know the security problems associated with this) and sed to change text in a file.

The problem is no matter what I try I can't seem to output the text with the quotes still intact. I've tried almost every combination of single and double quotes I could to escape it, but it hasn't worked. After hours of trying, I decided to ask the question here.

The code is in a PHP file:

shell_exec('sed -i "s/patterntoreplace/yolo(word,"Hello Everyone", word)/" test.txt

The problem is that the file ends up with:

yolo(word,Hello Everyone, word)

The quotes keep getting parsed and I absolutely need them. I tried various things such as putting it into a variable, using escapeshellarg and escapeshellcmd and trying various combinations of single and double quotes, but I still can't get it to work.

This is very frustrating for me because this is the last part of my project and it should be simple, yet I can't run my program without the quotes. It's rather infuriating.

Can someone please tell me what to replace in that command to get quotes to output correctly?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 4469

Answers (4)

justnajm
justnajm

Reputation: 4534

You can use slashes to use the quotes again inside, but keeping the internal quotes in mind only, in your case: main quote is single

// have added slashes to Hello Everyone
shell_exec('sed -i "s/patterntoreplace/yolo(word,\"Hello Everyone\", word)" test.txt')

Upvotes: 1

hek2mgl
hek2mgl

Reputation: 158160

This can and should be done with PHP, no sed required:

$filename = 'test.txt';
$pattern = 'patterntoreplace';
$replace = 'yolo(word,"Hello Everyone", word)';

$lines = []; 
foreach(file($filename) as $line) {
    $lines []= preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $line);
}

file_put_contents($filename, join("", $lines));

Upvotes: 1

Gumbo
Gumbo

Reputation: 655619

This should work:

$arg = 's/patterntoreplace/yolo(word,"Hello Everyone", word)/';
$cmd = 'sed -i '.escapeshellarg($arg).' test.txt';
shell_exec($cmd);

Upvotes: 2

Antonio Valero
Antonio Valero

Reputation: 31

have you tried to use \' instead of ' and \" instead of " where you dont wnat them to be parsed? They said that already! :)

Upvotes: 0

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