zsh: keep slash before parenthesis - echo

Question

I need to cache a string from a file to do a grep search later. That string has a slash before a parenthesis. After I grab the string and echo it in the shell, it behaves the way I expect; but in my script it drops the slash off.
There's a lot of text below, but the part of the string that matters is "(remainingTime)"
Line in file:
"session_will_expire_message" = "User session will expire in \(remainingTime). Please sign in again to avoid expiration in the middle of the transaction.";
Shell Command (working as expected):
% line="\"User session will expire in \(remainingTime). Please sign in again to avoid expiration in the middle of the transaction.\";"
% echo $line
"User session will expire in \(remainingTime). Please sign in again to avoid expiration in the middle of the transaction.";
% echo -E - $line
"User session will expire in \(remainingTime). Please sign in again to avoid expiration in the middle of the transaction.";
% val="$(echo -E - $line | cut -d";" -f1 | cut -d"=" -f2-)"
% echo $val
"User session will expire in \(remainingTime). Please sign in again to avoid expiration in the middle of the transaction."
% echo -E - "${val}"
"User session will expire in \(remainingTime). Please sign in again to avoid expiration in the middle of the transaction."
Script (NOT working as expected):
while read line; do
if [[ $(echo $line | grep -c "=") -gt 0 ]]; then
key="$(echo $line | cut -d";" -f1 | cut -d"=" -f1 | tr -d " ")"
val="$(echo -E - $line | cut -d";" -f1 | cut -d"=" -f2-)"
/* !!--> */ [[ $IS_VERBOSE == "TRUE" ]] && echo "key: $key" && echo -E - "value: ${val}"
/* !!--> */ [[ $key != "" && "${val}" != "" ]] && LOCALIZED_PAIR[$key]="${val}"
fi
done < $LOCALIZED_DICT # <-- This is an URI for .strings file
The lines marked with "!! -->" are outputting to shell and to a file without the slash...
key: "session_will_expire_message"
value: "User session will expire in (remainingTime). Please sign in again to avoid expiration in the middle of the transaction."
Why is my script working differently, and how can I fix it?
EDIT:
It seems the slash is getting stripped out by the while loop:
% while read l; do echo $l; done < ~/Desktop/tmpOutput
"User session will expire in (remainingTime). Please sign in again to avoid expiration in the middle of the transaction.";
If the slashes are being split when the while loop reads the line, is there a way to avoid that?

Answer 1

You have a lot of unnecessary extra processes. Aside from that, though, use the -r option to prevent read from processing any backslashes in the input.
while IFS== read -r key val; do
[[ -z $key || -z $val ]] && continue
if [[ $IS_VERBOSE == TRUE ]]; then
print -r "key: $key"
print -r "value: $val"
fi
LOCALIZED_PAIR[$key]=$val
done < "$LOCALIZED_DICT"