How to use Read command in echo like fill in the blanks - linux

Question

Am writing a script.Eg:
echo "my name is 'read' and am from 'read' city" > outfile.txt
When it runs it's not printing the sentence first, i.e my name is. Rather it's asking first to enter 2 inputs for 2 read commands used, then its forming the complete sentence like "my name is sudhir and am from vizag city"
I want script to execute 1st "my name is read(ask for input) and am from read(ask for another input) city" and after giving inputs it should redirect to outfile.txt in one shot.
How to handle this? Is it feasible to achieve in single sentence?
Because I want to use same logic for 480 questions all in one file and persons how don't have any scripting knowledge should able to add more questions taking reference of previous questions present in same file.

Answer 1

There isn't a pretty way to do this, since read writes the newline character from the input to the terminal, but we can do this in two passes.
Get the input from the user
Write the results to the file
You could put the following in a script
#!/bin/bash
echo -n 'my name is '; read -r name
echo -n ' and I am from '; read -r city
echo ' city'
printf "my name is %s and I am from %s city\n" \
"$name" "$city" > output.txt
And to the user it would look like this
my name is sudhir
and I am from vizag
city
But it would be like this in the file
my name is sudhir and I am from vizag city

Answer 2

You can write a function that takes a string with placeholders and asks the user to input for each of them:
#!/bin/bash
fill() {
arg="$*"
result=""
while [[ "$arg" =~ ([^_]*)(_+)(.*) ]]
do
read -rp "${BASH_REMATCH[1]# }${BASH_REMATCH[2]}: " input
result+="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}${input}"
arg="${BASH_REMATCH[3]}"
done
result+="$arg"
printf '%s\n' "$result"
}
exec > outputfile
fill "My name is ____ and I am from ___."
fill "My new years resolution is ____."
Example:
$ ./myscript
My name is ____: Sudhir
and I am from ___: Vizag
My new years resolution is ____: learning Bash instead of asking SO to write my scripts
$ cat outputfile
My name is Sudhir and I am from Vizag.
My new years resolution is learning Bash instead of asking SO to write my scripts.