title: escape curly braces in unix shell script
body: <p>I have a string:</p>
  
  <p><code>{2013/05/01},{2013/05/02},{2013/05/03}</code></p>
  
  <p>I want to append a { at the beginning and a } at the end. The output should be:</p>
  
  <p><code>{{2013/05/01},{2013/05/02},{2013/05/03}}</code></p>
  
  <p>However, in my shell script when I concatenate the curly braces to the beginning and end of the string, the output is as follows:</p>
  
  <p><code>{2013/05/01} {2013/05/02} {2013/05/03}</code></p>
  
  <p>Why does this happen? How can I achieve my result? Am sure there is a simple solution to this but I am a unix newbie, thus would appreciate some help.</p>
  
  <p>Test script:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#!/usr/bin/ksh 
  valid_data_range="{2013/05/01},{2013/05/02},{2013/05/03}"
  finalDates="{"$valid_data_range"}"
  print $finalDates
  </code></pre>