How do I split a string on a delimiter in Bash?

Question

I have this string stored in a variable:

IN=\"bla@some.com;john@home.com\"

Now I would like to split the strings by ; delimite

Answer 1

There are some cool answers here (errator esp.), but for something analogous to split in other languages -- which is what I took the original question to mean -- I settled on this:

IN="bla@some.com;john@home.com"
declare -a a="(${IN/;/ })";

Now ${a[0]}, ${a[1]}, etc, are as you would expect. Use ${#a[*]} for number of terms. Or to iterate, of course:

for i in ${a[*]}; do echo $i; done

IMPORTANT NOTE:

This works in cases where there are no spaces to worry about, which solved my problem, but may not solve yours. Go with the $IFS solution(s) in that case.