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

In Android shell, most of the proposed methods just do not work:

$ IFS=':' read -ra ADDR <<<"$PATH"                             
/system/bin/sh: can't create temporary file /sqlite_stmt_journals/mksh.EbNoR10629: No such file or directory

What does work is:

$ for i in ${PATH//:/ }; do echo $i; done
/sbin
/vendor/bin
/system/sbin
/system/bin
/system/xbin

where // means global replacement.

Answer 2

I think AWK is the best and efficient command to resolve your problem. AWK is included by default in almost every Linux distribution.

echo "bla@some.com;john@home.com" | awk -F';' '{print $1,$2}'

will give

bla@some.com john@home.com

Of course your can store each email address by redefining the awk print field.

Answer 3

Apart from the fantastic answers that were already provided, if it is just a matter of printing out the data you may consider using awk:

awk -F";" '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) printf("> [%s]\n", $i)}' <<< "$IN"

This sets the field separator to ;, so that it can loop through the fields with a for loop and print accordingly.

Test

$ IN="bla@some.com;john@home.com"
$ awk -F";" '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) printf("> [%s]\n", $i)}' <<< "$IN"
> [bla@some.com]
> [john@home.com]

With another input:

$ awk -F";" '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) printf("> [%s]\n", $i)}' <<< "a;b;c   d;e_;f"
> [a]
> [b]
> [c   d]
> [e_]
> [f]

Answer 4

Two bourne-ish alternatives where neither require bash arrays:

Case 1: Keep it nice and simple: Use a NewLine as the Record-Separator... eg.

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

while read i; do
  # process "$i" ... eg.
    echo "[email:$i]"
done <<< "$IN"

Note: in this first case no sub-process is forked to assist with list manipulation.

Idea: Maybe it is worth using NL extensively internally, and only converting to a different RS when generating the final result externally.

Case 2: Using a ";" as a record separator... eg.

NL="
" IRS=";" ORS=";"

conv_IRS() {
  exec tr "$1" "$NL"
}

conv_ORS() {
  exec tr "$NL" "$1"
}

IN="bla@some.com;john@home.com"
IN="$(conv_IRS ";" <<< "$IN")"

while read i; do
  # process "$i" ... eg.
    echo -n "[email:$i]$ORS"
done <<< "$IN"

In both cases a sub-list can be composed within the loop is persistent after the loop has completed. This is useful when manipulating lists in memory, instead storing lists in files. {p.s. keep calm and carry on B-) }

Answer 5

Without setting the IFS

If you just have one colon you can do that:

a="foo:bar"
b=${a%:*}
c=${a##*:}

you will get:

b = foo
c = bar

Answer 6

This also works:

IN="bla@some.com;john@home.com"
echo ADD1=`echo $IN | cut -d \; -f 1`
echo ADD2=`echo $IN | cut -d \; -f 2`

Be careful, this solution is not always correct. In case you pass "bla@some.com" only, it will assign it to both ADD1 and ADD2.