Split string by newline and space in Bourne shell

Question

I'm currently using the following to split a file into words - Is there some quicker way?

while read -r line
do
    for word in $line
    do
        words="${words}\n${word}"
    done
done

Answer 1

What about using tr?

tr -s [:space:] \n < myfile.txt

The -s squeezes multiple whitespace characters into one. You might need to escape some things to execute it.

Answer 2

xargs -n 1  echo <myfile.txt

Answer 3

sed 's/[[:space:]]/\n/g' file.txt