${(q)…}: Quote shell characters

q escapes characters, which are special to the shell, with a backslash \.

There are several variants of this flag:

• (q): Escaping of special characters, no quoting. Unprintable and invalid characters are shown as $'\NNN'.
• (qq): Escaping of special characters, always quoting with single quotes
• (q-): Escaping of special characters, minimal quoting with single quotes
• (q+): Escaping of special characters, minimal quoting with unprintable characters shown as $'...'
• (qqq): Escaping of special characters, always quoting with double quotes
• (qqqq): Escaping of special characters, always quoting with $'' quotes

Links

• Zsh manual on parameter expansion flags

Examples

Using parameter name indirection

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# contains newline and tab characters tokens=('*' $'\b' $'\t' "\"" "'" are special to the shell) echo "q:" ${(q)tokens} echo "qq:" ${(qq)tokens} echo "q-:" ${(q-)tokens} echo "q+:" ${(q+)tokens} echo "qqq:" ${(qqq)tokens} echo "qqqq:" ${(qqqq)tokens}

Output:

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q: \* $' $' ' \" \' are special to the shell qq: '*' ' ' ' '"' ''\''' 'are' 'special' 'to' 'the' 'shell' q-: '*' ' ' '"' \' are special to the shell q+: '*' $'\C-H' $' ' '"' \' are special to the shell qqq: "*" " " " "\"" "'" "are" "special" "to" "the" "shell" qqqq: $'*' $' $' ' $'"' $'\'' $'are' $'special' $'to' $'the' $'shell'