This regex will separate KEY=VALUE when VALUE has special characters that cause bash to misinterpret them

Hunts for the key and value in environment variables separated by newlines. _ All keys must be uppercase _

BASH will not know that you are attempting to assign something. The parser will see varname with no = and treat it as a command name, and then pass = and vardata to it as arguments. Match tilde, hash or colon special characters that have either a word character or a string-end on each side, you can...