How to convert text to html character codes with a bash script?

Question

I tried recode:

echo '>' | recode ascii..html
>

But it only seems to convert characters like > < and ":

echo 'a' | recode ascii..html
a

I want to convert letters and other characters too. I.e, the desired output of the above command is a.

Is there any simple way to do this without creating some big regular expression?

Answer 1

You can use printf to get ascii value of characters using ' in front of the variable. This will of course result in > instead of >. You can use the code bellow to convert $1 to a string of html ascii codes.

str=$1
for (( i=0; i<${#str}; i++ )); do
  c=${str:$i:1}
  printf "&#%d;" "'$c" #
done
echo ""