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Split string based on delimiter in Bash?
In a bash script how do I split string with a separator like ; and loop through the resulting array?
This question is related to
bash
You can probably skip the step of explicitly creating an array...
One trick that I like to use is to set the inter-field separator (IFS) to the delimiter character. This is especially handy for iterating through the space or return delimited results from the stdout of any of a number of unix commands.
Below is an example using semicolons (as you had mentioned in your question):
export IFS=";"
sentence="one;two;three"
for word in $sentence; do
echo "$word"
done
Note: in regular Bourne-shell scripting setting and exporting the IFS would occur on two separate lines (IFS='x'; export IFS;).
If you don't wish to mess with IFS (perhaps for the code within the loop) this might help.
If know that your string will not have whitespace, you can substitute the ';' with a space and use the for/in construct:
#local str
for str in ${STR//;/ } ; do
echo "+ \"$str\""
done
But if you might have whitespace, then for this approach you will need to use a temp variable to hold the "rest" like this:
#local str rest
rest=$STR
while [ -n "$rest" ] ; do
str=${rest%%;*} # Everything up to the first ';'
# Trim up to the first ';' -- and handle final case, too.
[ "$rest" = "${rest/;/}" ] && rest= || rest=${rest#*;}
echo "+ \"$str\""
done
sentence="one;two;three"
a="${sentence};"
while [ -n "${a}" ]
do
echo ${a%%;*}
a=${a#*;}
done
Here's a variation on ashirazi's answer which doesn't rely on $IFS. It does have its own issues which I ouline below.
sentence="one;two;three"
sentence=${sentence//;/$'\n'} # change the semicolons to white space
for word in $sentence
do
echo "$word"
done
Here I've used a newline, but you could use a tab "\t" or a space. However, if any of those characters are in the text it will be split there, too. That's the advantage of $IFS - it can not only enable a separator, but disable the default ones. Just make sure you save its value before you change it - as others have suggested.
Here is an example code that you may use:
$ STR="String;1;2;3"
$ for EACH in `echo "$STR" | grep -o -e "[^;]*"`; do
echo "Found: \"$EACH\"";
done
grep -o -e "[^;]*" will select anything that is not ';', therefore spliting the string by ';'.
Hope that help.
Source: Stackoverflow.com