How to remove specific characters (like newlines) from {{selection}} variable?

[nevertoday]

Description

Current Behavior

I'm trying to manipulate the text from the {{selection}} variable in my shell commands, specifically to remove certain special characters (like newlines). However, I haven't found a clear way to achieve this using shell commands.

Expected Behavior

I would like to be able to process the {{selection}} text to remove specific characters before it's used in the shell command.

Questions

1. Is there a built-in way to manipulate the {{selection}} variable content?
2. If not, what would be the recommended shell command approach to remove specific characters (like newlines) from the selection text?

Possible Solutions I've Considered

• Using tr command (but unsure about the correct syntax with the variable)
• Using sed (but need guidance on proper escaping and handling)

Technical Details

• Obsidian Version: [Please fill in your version]
• Shell Commands Plugin Version: [Please fill in your version]
• Operating System: [Please fill in your OS]

Examples

What I'm trying to achieve:

# If {{selection}} contains:
"Line 1
Line 2"

# I want to process it to become:
"Line 1Line 2"

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[Taitava]

Hi,

there's no builtin way to replace chacters in {{variables}}.

Looks like sed is line-based, so not a good fit here. Probably tr would be the way to go. Can you please try this answer in Stack Overflow? Maybe like this:

echo {{selection}} | tr -d '\n'

# For GNU version of tr:
echo {{selection}} | tr --delete '\n'

Another way could be to put {{selection}} to stdin and then leave out the echo part by calling just: tr -d '\n'. It should do the same thing. If your selection might be really long (e.g hundreds of lines), this is probably a better option, as it avoids the limit how long a shell command (with its arguments) can be.

P.S. I'll move this discussion from Ideas to Q&A.

[nevertoday]

my trick way, but not 100% do well:

echo {{selection}} | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*$/---/g' > ~/Downloads/processed.txt && osascript -e 'set the clipboard to (do shell script "cat ~/Downloads/processed.txt")' -e 'delay 0.3' -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "v" using command down' && rm -f ~/Downloads/processed.txt

temp file