> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://notes.eliasnorrby.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://notes.eliasnorrby.com/bash/change-quote-mid-string.md).

# Change quote style mid-string

When building a string in bash, we're not limited to one type of quotes (i.e. single `'` or double `"` quotes) - you can switch mid string. This is especially useful if we require double quotes for part of the string to interpolate a variable, but using double quotes for the entire string would require many other characters to be escaped.

Say we have this `grep` command for finding `yaml` code blocks within a markdown file:

````bash
grep -E '^[[:space:]]*```ya?ml[[:space:]]*$' example.md
````

If we want to use a variable for the language part, we can use double quotes for just that part of the string, eliminating the need to escape the backticks:

````bash
language='ya?ml'
grep -E '^[[:space:]]*```'"$language"'[[:space:]]*$' test/assets/example.md
````