escape curly braces in unix shell script

Question

I have a string:

{2013/05/01},{2013/05/02},{2013/05/03}

I want to append a { at the beginning and a } at the end. The output should be:

{{2013/05/01},{2013/05/02},{2013/05/03}}

However, in my shell script when I concatenate the curly braces to the beginning and end of the string, the output is as follows:

{2013/05/01} {2013/05/02} {2013/05/03}

Why does this happen? How can I achieve my result? Am sure there is a simple solution to this but I am a unix newbie, thus would appreciate some help.

Test script:

#!/usr/bin/ksh 
valid_data_range="{2013/05/01},{2013/05/02},{2013/05/03}"
finalDates="{"$valid_data_range"}"
print $finalDates

Answer 1

You can say:

finalDates=$'{'"$valid_data_range"$'}'