Replace one substring for another string in shell script

Question

I have \"I love Suzi and Marry\" and I want to change \"Suzi\" to \"Sara\".

#!/bin/bash
firstString=\"I love Suzi and Marry\"
secondString=\"Sara\"
# do some         


        

Answer 1

It's better to use bash than sed if strings have RegExp characters.

echo ${first_string/Suzi/$second_string}

It's portable to Windows and works with at least as old as Bash 3.1.

To show you don't need to worry much about escaping let's turn this:

/home/name/foo/bar

Into this:

~/foo/bar

But only if /home/name is in the beginning. We don't need sed!

Given that bash gives us magic variables $PWD and $HOME, we can:

echo "${PWD/#$HOME/\~}"

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EDIT: Thanks for Mark Haferkamp in the comments for the note on quoting/escaping ~.*

Note how the variable $HOME contains slashes but this didn't break anything.

Further reading: Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide.
If using sed is a must, be sure to escape every character.