Re: [Help-bash] Substring Replacement

[Greg Wooledge]

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 08:08:21PM +0200, Richard Taubo wrote:
> I have solution working like this (thanks to input from this list earlier):
> while IFS= read -r -d "" path; do
> echo -n "<li><ul>"
> echo -n "${path//\//<li>}"
> echo -n"</ul></li>"
> echo -n "</ul>"
> done < <(find  my_directory  -print0)
> 
> 
> It works fine, but I am measuring if I can get a little speed boost by doing 
> something like this:
> find  my_directory  -print0 | /usr/bin/xargs -0 -I {} /bin/echo 
> "<li><ul>"${IS_IT_POSSIBLE_TO_PICK_UP_ECHO_VALUE_HERE//\//<li>}"</ul></li>"

Well, forking /bin/echo for each file & directory is definitely not
going to improve speed.

The short answer is "No, in your sample code, there is no shell to interpret
the ${...} and perform an expansion."  The input data is only available to
xargs, and then to the command spawned by xargs.  /bin/echo doesn't do
expansions.

If you want to perform an expansion at that point, you would need to
have an xargs option to perform generalized substitutions (I don't know
of any such xargs extensions), or you would need to have xargs launch
a shell which can interpret the ${...}.  Which would basically lead you
right back to your working code example, only slower.

A different approach would be to let sed do the search-and-replace,
instead of doing it in the shell:

while IFS= read -r -d "" path; do
echo -n "<li><ul>"
echo -n "${path}"
echo -n"</ul></li>"
echo -n "</ul>"
done < <(find  my_directory  -print0 | sed 's#/#<li>#g')

Though personally I'd write it this way:

while IFS= read -r -d "" path; do
  printf '<li><ul>%s</ul></li></ul>\n' "$path"
done < <(find  my_directory  -print0 | sed 's#/#<li>#g')

I added \n because I hate when I view HTML source code and it's all one
gigantic line.  I think you're missing a <ul> in front of it, too.