AWS CLI providing of a param as escaped JSON fails when referenced as a variable – Amazon Web Sevices

I’m a little bit desperate to automate the AVRO schema registration for AWS Glue Schema Registry.

According to the official documentation (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/glue/latest/dg/schema-registry-gs.html#schema-registry-gs4) to register a new AVRO schema following command must be executed:

aws glue create-schema --registry-id RegistryName="my-registry-name" --schema-name testschema --compatibility BACKWARD --data-format AVRO --schema-definition "{"type":"record","name":"r1","fields":[{"name":"f1","type":"int"},{"name":"f2","type":"string"}]}"

This example also works pretty well. But now I want to automate this process for other schemas and for this purpose I’m storing this schema definition in a shell variable by doing the following:

current_schema=$(testschema.avro | jq -c | jq -R)

So here I have exactly the same Avro schema but this time it is in the valid *.avro file in a valid JSON format. So I’m converting it into a one liner, escaping the JSON and store the output into a $current_schema variable.
When I’m trying to echo this variable I see exactly the same escaped JSON like provided in the official documentation:

echo $current_schema
"{"type":"record","name":"r1","fields":[{"name":"f1","type":"int"},{"name":"f2","type":"string"}]}"

But the magic starts when I’m trying to use $current_schema as a very last parameter in the aws command:

aws glue create-schema --registry-id RegistryName="my-registry-name" --schema-name testschema --compatibility BACKWARD --data-format AVRO --schema-definition $current_schema

I see following error output:

An error occurred (InvalidInputException) when calling the CreateSchema operation: Schema definition of AVRO data format is invalid: Illegal initial character: {"type":"record","name":"r1","fields":[{"name":"f1","type":"int"},{"name":"f2","type":"string"}]}

Does anyone have any idea what’s going on? How can I solve this problem? It must be possible to read random *.avro schema file, escape JSON and provide that escaped JSON as a –schema-definition parameter value. Unfortunately it works only when I put escaped JSON of the scheme "as is".

Thank you!