Unescpaing huge single-line string on Linux

Posted by Lajos Nagy on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Lajos Nagy
Published on 2010-05-11T22:26:38Z Indexed on 2010/05/11 22:34 UTC
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unix

|

linux

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bash

I ended up with a huge, single line string literal (don't ask me how) where everything is escaped (mostly), including new lines and double quotes. Problem is, I want the original string. The string is huge so I'm not even sure how to begin. Here's what I have:

"This\n is \"nice\",\nain\'t it?"

This is what I want:

This
 is "nice",
ain't it?

Again, the problem is that other shell sensitive stuff is not escaped (like $, or !), and that the string is couple of megabytes.

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