Read tab-separated file line into array

Question

I would like to read a file into a script  line by line  Each line in the file is multiple values separated by a tab  I d like to read each line into an array    Typical bash  read file by line  example   while read line do echo  line  done  lt   myfile    For me though  myfile looks like this  tab separated values    value1 value2 value3 value4 value5 value6   On each iteration of the loop  I d like each line to go into an array so I can  while read line into myArray do  echo myArray 0   echo myArray 1   echo myArray 2  done  lt   myfile    This would print the following on the first loop iteration   value1 value2 value3   Then on the second iteration it would print  value4 value5 value6   Is this possible  The only way I can see is to write a small function to break out the values manually  is there built in support in bash for this

User · Answer

If you really want to split every word  bash meaning  into a different array index completely changing the array in every while loop iteration   ruakh s answer is the correct approach  But you can use the read property to split every read word into different variables column1  column2  column3 like in this code snippet  while IFS    t  read -r column1 column2 column3   do   printf   b n   column1 lt   column1  gt     printf   b n   column2 lt   column2  gt     printf   b n   column3 lt   column3  gt   done  lt   myfile    to reach a similar result avoiding array index  access and improving your code readability by using meaningful variable names  of course using columnN is not a good idea to do so

User · Answer

You re very close   while IFS    t  read -r -a myArray do  echo    myArray 0     echo    myArray 1     echo    myArray 2    done  lt  myfile    The -r tells read that   isn t special in the input data  the -a myArray tells it to split the input-line into words and store the results in myArray  and the IFS    t  tells it to use only tabs to split words  instead of the regular Bash default of also allowing spaces to split words as well  Note that this approach will treat one or more tabs as the delimiter  so if any field is blank  later fields will be  shifted  into earlier positions in the array  Is that O K

User · Answer

You could also try   OIFS  IFS  IFS   t    animals  cat animals txt  animalArray  animals   for animal in  animalArray do     echo  animal done  IFS  OIFS

[arrays] Read tab-separated file line into array

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