Split string based on delimiter in bash?

Question

How to split string based on delimiter in bash?

I have this string stored in a variable:

IN="[email protected];[email protected]"

Now I would like to split the strings by ';' delimiter so that I have

ADDR1="[email protected]"
ADDR2="[email protected]"

Don't necessarily need ADDR1, ADDR2 variables, if they are elements of an array that's even better.

Edit: After suggestions from answers below I ended up with the following which is what I was after:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

IN="[email protected];[email protected]"

arr=$(echo $IN | tr ";" "\n")

for x in $arr
do
    echo "> [$x]"
done

output:

> [[email protected]]
> [[email protected]]

Edit2: There was a solution involving setting IFS to ';', not sure what happened with that answer, how do you reset IFS back to default?

Edit3: RE: IFS solution, I tried this and it works, I keep the old IFS and then restore it:

IN="[email protected];[email protected]"

OIFS=$IFS
IFS=';'
arr2=$IN
for x in $arr2
do
    echo "> [$x]"
done

IFS=$OIFS

Btw, when I tried

arr2=($IN)

I only got the first string when printing it in loop, without brackets around $IN it works.

Answer 1

If you don't mind processing them immediately, I like to do this:

for i in $(echo $IN | tr ";" "\n")
do
  # process
done

You could use this kind of loop to initialize an array, but there's probably an easier way to do it. Hope this helps, though.

Answer 2

echo "[email protected];[email protected]" | sed -e 's/;/\n/g'
[email protected]
[email protected]

Answer 3

You can set the IFS variable, and then let it parse into an array. When this happens in a command, then the assignment to IFS only takes place to that single command's envionment ( to read ). It then parses the input according to the IFS variable value into an array, which we can then iterate over.

IFS=';' read -ra ADDR <<< "$IN"
for i in "${ADDR[@]}"; do 
    # process "$i"
done

It will parse one line of items separated by ;, pushing it into an array. Stuff for processing whole of $IN, each time one line of input separated by ;:

 while IFS=';' read -ra ADDR; do 
      for i in "${ADDR[@]}"; do
          # process "$i"
      done 
 done <<< "$IN"

Answer 4

How about this approach:

IN="[email protected];[email protected]" 
set -- "$IN" 
IFS=";"; declare -a Array=($*) 
echo "${Array[@]}" 
echo "${Array[0]}" 
echo "${Array[1]}"

Taken from:

antonolsen.com/2006/04/10/bash-split-a-string-without-cut-or-awk/

Answer 5

How about this one liner, if you're not using arrays:

IFS=';' read ADDR1 ADDR2 <<<$IN

Answer 6

You may also:

dirList=(
some
list
of
elements
)

for i in ${dirList[@]}; do
...
done

Answer 7

This works:

echo "one two three four" | { read FIRST REST ; echo "{$FIRST} {$REST}"; }

But this does not:

echo "one two three four" | read FIRST REST ; echo "{$FIRST} {$REST}"; 

How is this possible?