bash printf %q weirdness and UTF-8

[broberts]

I'm trying to get nice escaped strings via bash. The script works fine so long as there aren't high ASCII (UTF-8) characters.

#!/bin/bash
KKK="…hkjh'"
echo ${KKK}
printf "%b\n" "${KKK}"
printf -v GGG "%q" "${KKK}"
printf "%b\n" "${GGG}"

and what I get is

…hkjh'
…hkjh'
$'…hkjh\''

which is not what I was expecting (the leading $ and single quote wrappers).

My shell is LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and it seems to handle the display of UTF-8 fine.

The … is UTF code pt +2026 or 0xE280A6.

[broberts]

So my hack is adding:

GGG=$(printf "%b\n" "${GGG}")
if [[ "${GGG:0:1}" = "\$" ]]; then 
  LL=${#GGG}
  GGG="${GGG:2:($LL-3)}"
fi
echo $GGG

which yields:

…hkjh\'