Jquery like templates for formatting strings in bash

Question

#!/bin/bash rm all for f in assets/css/*.css; do printf "<style type='text/css' >\n" >> all cat $f >> all printf "</style>\n <!-----$f---->" >> all echo "$f copied" done 

I am using this code to copy all css content with the file names into a html file. This code works fine.

But the way strings are concatenated, it is mixing up the templates and the logic.

Can this be written more elegantly that has a template string like,

<style type='text/css'> ${cssContent} </style><!---${cssFileName}---> 

and an associative array like,

{ 'cssContent' : 'file content', 'cssFileName' : 'file name' } 

and a function as,

format(templateStr, assocArr) 

that returns me the formatted string?

Answer 1

Bash apparently has assosiative array support, but I don't recommend to use it because there's no easy way to pass it to a function as argument. Instead this script defines key/value pairs interleaved in a simple array and pass them to format() as ordinal parameters.

#!/bin/bash format() ( T="$1" shift while test $# -ge 2; do eval "$1"'=$(echo "$2")' shift 2 done eval "cat <<END_OF_TEMPLATE $T END_OF_TEMPLATE" ) read -r -d '' templateStr <<'EOF' <style type='text/css'> ${cssContent} </style><!---${cssFileName}---> EOF assocArr=( cssFileName "abc.css" cssContent $'.abc {\n display: none;\n}\n' ) format "$templateStr" "${assocArr[@]}" 

Output:

$ bash format.sh <style type='text/css'> .abc { display: none; } </style><!---abc.css---> 

Note that $templateStr cannot contain line END_OF_TEMPLATE.