How can I escape curly braces at the end of a regular expression

Question

I have the following bash script to replace parenthesis for curly braces.

VARS=${VARS//(/{}
VARS=${VARS//)/}}

The first line works OK, but the second one will only add a curly brace at the end.

If I try to escape the curly brace with a backslash, the backslash itself gets stored in the variable.

Is there a different way to escape these curly braces from the string?

Answer 1

You have to quote the first } so that bash does not think this is the end of the expression:

VARS=${VARS//)/\}}

Answer 2

Here is an alternative method:

VARS=`echo ${VARS} | tr '()' '{}'`

Although it seems like escaping the curly brace with a backslash is working, here is what I was using:

VARS=${VARS//(/{}
VARS=${VARS//)/\}}