How to split one string into multiple variables in bash shell

Question

I ve been looking for a solution and found similar questions  only they were attempting to split sentences with spaces between them  and the answers do not work for my situation   Currently a variable is being set to something a string like this  ABCDE-123456 and I would like to split that into 2 variables  while eliminating the  quot - quot   i e   var1 ABCDE var2 123456  How is it possible to accomplish this    This is the solution that worked for me  var1   echo  STR   cut -f1 -d-  var2   echo  STR   cut -f2 -d-  Is it possible to use the cut command that will work without a delimiter  each character gets set as a variable   var1   echo  STR   cut -f1 -d   var2   echo  STR   cut -f1 -d   var3   echo  STR   cut -f1 -d   etc

User · Answer

read with IFS are perfect for this     IFS - read var1 var2  lt  lt  lt  ABCDE-123456   echo   var1  ABCDE   echo   var2  123456   Edit   Here is how you can read each individual character into array elements     read -a foo  lt  lt  lt    echo  ABCDE-123456    sed  s    amp   g      Dump the array     declare -p foo declare -a foo    0   A   1   B   2   C   3   D   4   E   5   -   6   1   7   2   8   3   9   4   10   5   11   6      If there are spaces in the string     IFS    v  read -a foo  lt  lt  lt    echo  ABCDE 123456    sed  s    amp  v g      declare -p foo declare -a foo    0   A   1   B   2   C   3   D   4   E   5       6   1   7   2   8   3   9   4   10   5   11   6

User · Answer

If you know it s going to be just two fields  you can skip the extra subprocesses like this   var1   STR -   var2   STR  -    What does this do    STR -   deletes the shortest substring of  STR that matches the pattern -  starting from the end of the string    STR  -  does the same  but with the  - pattern and starting from the beginning of the string  They each have counterparts    and    which find the longest anchored pattern match  If anyone has a helpful mnemonic to remember which does which  let me know  I always have to try both to remember

User · Answer

If your solution doesn t have to be general  i e  only needs to work for strings like your example  you could do   var1   echo  STR   cut -f1 -d-  var2   echo  STR   cut -f2 -d-    I chose cut here because you could simply extend the code for a few more variables

User · Answer

Sounds like a job for set with a custom IFS   IFS - set  STR var1  1 var2  2    You will want to do this in a function with a local IFS so you don t mess up other parts of your script where you require IFS to be what you expect

User · Answer

Using bash regex capabilities   re      -   -           ABCDE-123456      re     amp  amp  var1    BASH REMATCH 1     amp  amp  var2    BASH REMATCH 2    echo  var1 echo  var2   OUTPUT  ABCDE 123456

[bash] How to split one string into multiple variables in bash shell?

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