A command-line tool that wraps each line of input with a specified delimiter. Useful for formatting text data, preparing strings for code, or processing structured data.

• Wrap lines with any delimiter (default: double-quote)
• Support for hexadecimal delimiter notation
• Strip whitespace before wrapping
• Skip empty lines
• Escape delimiter characters within lines
• Read from files or STDIN (auto-detects piped input - - is optional when reading from a pipe)
• Write to files or STDOUT
• Process null-terminated input (compatible with find -print0, xargs -0)
• Automatically skip empty last lines

git clone https://github.com/jftuga/wrapline
cd wrapline
make

This creates the wrapline executable in the current directory.

wrapline [options] <filename|->

• -d <delimiter> - Delimiter to wrap lines with (default: ")
  • Supports literal strings: -d "|"
  • Supports hex notation: -d 0x27 for single quote
• -s - Strip whitespace from lines before wrapping
• -e - Do not emit empty lines
• -escape - Escape delimiter characters within lines using backslash
• -o <file> - Write output to file instead of STDOUT
• -0 - Read null-terminated records instead of newlines
• -v - Show version and exit

• Provide a filename to read from a file
• Use - to read from STDIN
• When data is piped into wrapline, reading from STDIN is assumed automatically — the - argument is optional

Wrap lines with double quotes (default):

wrapline input.txt

Input:

hello
world

Output:

"hello"
"world"

Wrap lines with single quotes:

wrapline -d "'" input.txt

Output:

'hello'
'world'

Use hexadecimal notation for delimiters (useful for special characters):

# Pipe character (0x7C = ASCII 124)
wrapline -d 0x7C input.txt

# Tab character (0x09)
wrapline -d 0x09 input.txt

Remove leading and trailing whitespace before wrapping:

wrapline -s input.txt

Input:

  hello
   world

Output:

"hello"
"world"

Don't output empty lines:

wrapline -e input.txt

Input:

hello

world

Output:

"hello"
"world"

Escape delimiter characters found within lines:

wrapline -escape input.txt

Input:

She said "hello" to me

Output:

"She said \"hello\" to me"

Write results to a file instead of STDOUT:

wrapline -d "|" input.txt -o output.txt

wrapline automatically reads from piped input, so the - argument is optional:

echo "hello world" | wrapline
cat input.txt | wrapline -d "'" -s

You can still use - explicitly if preferred:

echo "hello world" | wrapline -

Process null-terminated records (like find -print0):

find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | wrapline -0 -

This is useful when filenames may contain newlines or special characters.

Combine multiple options for complex processing:

# Strip whitespace, skip empty lines, escape quotes, write to file
wrapline -s -e -escape -o output.txt input.txt

# Process null-terminated, custom delimiter, output to file
find . -type f -print0 | wrapline -0 -d "'" -o filelist.txt -

wrapline can be used in conjunction with paste to produce a CSV-style list:

seq 1 10 | wrapline | paste -sd, -

"1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9","10"

Convert a list of values into quoted strings for code:

wrapline cities.txt

Input:

New York
Los Angeles
Chicago

Output:

"New York"
"Los Angeles"
"Chicago"

Wrap fields with quotes:

wrapline -escape data.txt

Process files found by find:

find /var/log -name "*.log" -print0 | wrapline -0 -d "'" -

Strip whitespace and remove empty lines:

wrapline -s -e messy_data.txt -o clean_data.txt

• Empty lines at the end of input are always skipped, regardless of flags
• When using -e, all empty lines are skipped
• The -s flag strips whitespace before checking if a line is empty
• Hexadecimal delimiter values must be prefixed with 0x
• Without the 0x prefix, numeric strings are treated as literal delimiters
• wrapline automatically detects piped input and does not require - when reading from a pipe