Convert file path to URI in bash

Question

How can I convert a file path to an URI in the command-line?

Example:

/home/MHC/directory with spaces and ümläuts

to

file:///home/MHC/directory%20with%20spaces%20and%20%C3%BCml%C3%A4uts

Answer 1

One way to do this is using urlencode (install it on Ubuntu via sudo apt-get install gridsite-clients).

urlencode -m "$filepath"

will convert the path to an URI. The "file://" part of the URI will be left out, but you can easily add that via a bash one-liner:

uri=$(urlencode -m "$1"); echo "file://$uri"

or directly

echo "file://$(urlencode -m "$1")"

or

echo -n file://; urlencode -m "$1"

Many thanks to Michael Kjörling for the references!

Answer 2

On CentOS, no extra dependencies needed:

$ python -c "import urllib;print urllib.quote(raw_input())" <<< "$my_url"

Answer 3

You can also use the Perl module URI::file directly from the command line:

$ path="/home/MHC/directory with spaces and ümläuts"
$ echo $path | perl -MURI::file -e 'print URI::file->new(<STDIN>)."\n"'
file:///home/MHC/directory%20with%20spaces%20and%20%C3%BCml%C3%A4uts
$

Answer 4

Rockallite gave a good answer, but I didn't want to type that every time.

I made a reusable bash function to do this called "file2url". To see where to save bash functions, take a look at this thread on SO.

file2url () {
    python -c "import sys, pathlib; print(pathlib.Path(input()).resolve().as_uri())" <<< $1
}

This assumes that you have a python3 installed with the name "python".

Answer 5

You can pass path as argument to the following script:

#!/usr/bin/env gjs

const { Gio } = imports.gi;

let path = Gio.File.new_for_path(ARGV[0]);
let uri = path.get_uri();
print(uri);

To convert from uri to path use the following script:

#!/usr/bin/env gjs

const { Gio } = imports.gi;

let uri = Gio.File.new_for_uri(ARGV[0]);
let path = uri.get_path();
print(path);