Do zsh or bash have quotes that are convenient for English text?

Question

If I use single quotes, words with apostrophes ("don't") are annoying to escape:

'Don'"'"'t do that'

If I use double quotes, dollar signs and exclamation points trip it up:

"It cost like \$1000\!"

Is there another kind of quoting I can use?

edit: I should also add that I would like to pass this string directly as a command line argument, rather than storing it in a variable. To this end I tried, using DigitalRoss's solution,

$ echo "$(cat << \EOF 
Don't $worry be "happy".
EOF)"

but get

dquote cmdsubst> 

after hitting enter :/ . So at this point ZyX's suggestion of setopt rcquotes looks to be the most convenient.

Answer 1

With zsh you may do

setopt rcquotes

. Then ASCII apostrophes are escaped just like this:

echo 'Don''t'

. Or setup your keymap to be able to enter UTF apostrophes, they have no issues with any kind of quotes (including none) in any shell:

echo 'Don’t'

. Third works both for zsh and bash:

echo $'Don\'t'

.

Neither first nor third can narrow down quote to a single character, but they are still less verbose for non-lengthy strings then heredocs suggested above. With zsh you can do this by using custom accept-line widget that will replace constructs like 'Don't' with 'Don'\''t'. Requires rather tricky regex magic that I can write only in perl; and is probably not the best idea as I can’t pretend I can cover all possible cases before they will hit. It won’t in any case touch any scripts.

Answer 2

I like the direction Zsolt Botykai is going. Here is an example that works with any Posix shell. (I also verified that it survived its paste into the SO server.)

$ read -r x << \EOF
Don't $worry be "happy".
EOF
$ echo $x
Don't $worry be "happy".

The things that make this work;

• -r will make \ not be magic
• the \EOF instead of just EOF makes $ not be magic