How to backslash a dynamic string in bash

Question

I want to backslash a variable automatically so that the end users don't need to type the backslashes for a Perl regex string replacement.

API_URI="http://something/api"
FIND="(API_URI)(.*?[\=])(.*?[\'](.*?[\']))"
REPLACE="\\1\\2 \'$API_URI\'"
perl -pi -e "s/${FIND}/${REPLACE}/" file.ext

Answer 1

By all means use Perl if you want to, but doesn't this sed do the trick?

echo "$API_URI" | sed 's/\//\\\//g'
http:\/\/something\/api

Or... in straight Bash:

echo "${API_URI//\//\\/}"
http:\/\/something\/api