Check if a Bash array contains a value

Question

In Bash, what is the simplest way to test if an array contains a certain value?

Answer 1

My version of the regular expressions technique that's been suggested already:

values=(foo bar)
requestedValue=bar

requestedValue=${requestedValue##[[:space:]]}
requestedValue=${requestedValue%%[[:space:]]}
[[ "${values[@]/#/X-}" =~ "X-${requestedValue}" ]] || echo "Unsupported value"

What's happening here is that you're expanding the entire array of supported values into words and prepending a specific string, "X-" in this case, to each of them, and doing the same to the requested value. If this one is indeed contained in the array, then the resulting string will at most match one of the resulting tokens, or none at all in the contrary. In the latter case the || operator triggers and you know you're dealing with an unsupported value. Prior to all of that the requested value is stripped of all leading and trailing whitespace through standard shell string manipulation.

It's clean and elegant, I believe, though I'm not too sure of how performant it may be if your array of supported values is particularly large.