Replace double quotes and space using sed

Question

I'm on rhel5 and have the following problem: I have a function which replaces all the content from a given line with the text i want it to. Everything works fine till i need double quotes to be placed. following is the code:

ReplaceLine()
{
       txnFile="File.xml"
        if [ "$2" == "enable" ];then
                replace="<ref bean=\\"$3\\"/>"
        else
                replace="<!--<ref bean=\\"$3\\"/>-->"
        fi
        sed -i "$1s/.*/$replace/" $txnFile 
}

$1=line number
$2=enable/disable
$3=string to be put

Current code replaces the given line in the file with this:

<ref bean=beginEventBean/>

What i want is this:

<ref bean="beginEventBean"/>

Notice the missing double quotes. Also i used double quotes in sed as without them the spaces in the variables were causing sed to throw errors.

Please help me understand where i'm going the wrong way. Spent hours on this already.

Answer 1

You forgot to escape the forward slash closing the tag. And you put two many slashes.

# one line solution
# sed -i "$1s/.*/<ref bean=\"$3\"\/>/" $txnFile
#                          ^   ^ ^

ReplaceLine()
{
     txnFile="File.xml"
     if [ "$2" == "enable" ];then
            replace="<ref bean=\"$3\"\/>"
     else
            replace="<!--<ref bean=\"$3\"\/>-->"
     fi
     sed -i "$1s/.*/$replace/" $txnFile 
}

Answer 2

Without seeing the source line, I cannot test my solutions. Nevertheless, the following line is definitely not doing what you think:

replace="<ref bean=\\"$3\\"/>"
        ^          ^ ^
        |          | |
start quoted       | |
           backslash |
            end quoted

Add one more backslash, or delete one.