[linux] How to parse a CSV file in Bash?

I'm working on a long Bash script. I want to read cells from a CSV file into Bash variables. I can parse lines and the first column, but not any other column. Here's my code so far:

  cat myfile.csv|while read line
  do
    read -d, col1 col2 < <(echo $line)
    echo "I got:$col1|$col2"
  done

It's only printing the first column. As an additional test, I tried the following:

read -d, x y < <(echo a,b,)

And $y is empty. So I tried:

read x y < <(echo a b)

And $y is b. Why?

We can parse csv files with quoted strings and delimited by say | with following code

while read -r line
do
    field1=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'|' '{printf "%s", $1}' | tr -d '"')
    field2=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'|' '{printf "%s", $2}' | tr -d '"')

    echo "$field1 $field2"
done < "$csvFile"

awk parses the string fields to variables and tr removes the quote.

Slightly slower as awk is executed for each field.

From the man page:

-d delim The first character of delim is used to terminate the input line, rather than newline.

You are using -d, which will terminate the input line on the comma. It will not read the rest of the line. That's why $y is empty.

If you want to read CSV file with some lines, so this the solution.

while IFS=, read -ra line
do 
    test $i -eq 1 && ((i=i+1)) && continue
    for col_val in ${line[@]}
    do
        echo -n "$col_val|"                 
    done
    echo        
done < "$csvFile"