How to capture plantuml.jar output in shell?

Question

I want to capture the output of plantuml.jar running, to for example save it, reformat it (indent, etc) or similar. So, I want to:

* run java -jar plantuml.jar -v [etc...] and capture the output in a shell variable, for instance. It should not be printed to the console.

But I cannot get it to behave nicely as other commandline tools ;-)

In bash, this works for most all commands you can think of:

foo=$(cat test.txt); echo "Need to write this first..."; echo $foo

So, I want this to work:

foo=$(java -jar ./plantuml.jar -v -tpng -charset UTF-8 -o ./testimage.png ./src/nkp/test.puml); echo "Not yet"; sleep 1; echo $foo

But it does not.

Any errors i am doing? Solutions? Workarounds?

BR! /mawi

Comments

Might it be that the errors go to `stderr` and you are only catching `stdout`?

---

Solved! Thanks for your reply Albert! That was it!

What a rookie mistake! Lol! I can't believe I did not consider that. I had already routed stderr to stdout in my script, but... oh well... there it is! Thanks again.

For any readers benefit, here is the working bash line, to in this example indent the plantuml output (which is what I was after for my logging):

foo=$(2>&1 java -jar ./plantuml.jar -v -tpng -charset UTF-8 -o ./testimage.png ./src/nkp/test.puml); echo "$foo" | sed 's/^/    /'

Thanks again Albert.

And as always, thanks to the plantuml team for an awesome tool! :)

BR! /mawi

PS
of course to just indent, you can just pipe and not use a variable "in between", so:

2>&1 java -jar ./plantuml.jar -v -tpng -charset UTF-8 -o ./testimage.png ./src/nkp/test.puml | sed 's/^/    /'