Is there a way in bash to convert a string into a lower case string?
For example, if I have:
a="Hi all"
I want to convert it to:
"hi all"
2
The are various ways:
POSIX standard
tr
$ echo "$a" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
hi all
AWK
$ echo "$a" | awk '{print tolower($0)}'
hi all
Non-POSIX
You may run into portability issues with the following examples:
Bash 4.0
$ echo "${a,,}"
hi all
sed
$ echo "$a" | sed -e 's/\(.*\)/\L\1/'
hi all
# this also works:
$ sed -e 's/\(.*\)/\L\1/' <<< "$a"
hi all
Perl
$ echo "$a" | perl -ne 'print lc'
hi all
Bash
lc(){
case "$1" in
[A-Z])
n=$(printf "%d" "'$1")
n=$((n+32))
printf \\$(printf "%o" "$n")
;;
*)
printf "%s" "$1"
;;
esac
}
word="I Love Bash"
for((i=0;i<${#word};i++))
do
ch="${word:$i:1}"
lc "$ch"
done
Note: YMMV on this one. Doesn’t work for me (GNU bash version 4.2.46 and 4.0.33 (and same behaviour 2.05b.0 but nocasematch is not implemented)) even with using shopt -u nocasematch;
. Unsetting that nocasematch causes [[ “fooBaR” == “FOObar” ]] to match OK BUT inside case weirdly [b-z] are incorrectly matched by [A-Z]. Bash is confused by the double-negative (“unsetting nocasematch”)! 🙂