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POSed and Awk Escaping Ampersands (&)
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copied!<p>I'm parsing a PHP file and wrapping function prototype elements in HTML. If there are ampersands however, it breaks my code.</p> <p><strong>Input</strong>: <code>function foo (&$var1, &$var2){...}</code>//as String<br> <strong>Desired output (in HTML)</strong>: <code>&$var1, &$var2</code> <em>//basically, just output the variables so that they are properly displayed in a browser</em></p> <p>Right now, I am sending each variable into awk's sub method<sup><b>1</b></sup>, and then to sed.</p> <pre><code>sub(/^&/, "\\\&", param) #param is the variable of interest (e.g. &$var1) #Intermediate step in case it's relevant. The awk-processed elements #are sent to ${file}_param.txt. Each set of parameters are delimited by colons. param=$(cut -d: -f$counter ${file}_param.txt) #Replace some default text in template file with real stuff. sed -i "s|@PARAM|$param|1" "$base"_funct_def.txt </code></pre> <p><strong>Output I'm getting:</strong> The ampersands are being interpreted. The entire match is replaced.</p> <p><strong>Isolation of issue:</strong> Doing the following instead displays 'g$var1' in the browser as I want it to. However, I'm trying to get an '&' instead.</p> <pre><code>sub(/^&/, "g", param) </code></pre> <p><strong>My attempts:</strong> I used three backslashes because I thought awk would first process it into '\&' which, fed into sed, would interpret '\&' as the literal '&'. I have tried anywhere from 1 to 6 backslashes though, to no avail.</p> <p><strong>QUESTION:</strong> How can I escape the &?</p> <p><sup><b>1</b></sup>Manual: <a href="http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~oostr102/docs/nawk/nawk_92.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~oostr102/docs/nawk/nawk_92.html</a></p> <hr> <p><em>Some "meta"/design questions about what I'm trying to do (not needed for question!!)</em><br> I have bunch of PHP files that I'm trying to generate a bit of documentation for (structured like Javadocs). I'm going through and parsing it using REGEX and shell scripts, so that I list out the function name, parameters, and return item(s). So far, REGEX has worked out pretty well I think, but I have read a lot about how this is something that REGEX should NOT be used for. I'd welcome any comments about any of this (how is documentation usually generated?). Thanks guys!</p>

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