Split string into an array in Bash

Question

In a Bash script I would like to split a line into pieces and store them in an array.

The line:

Paris, France, Europe

I would like

Answer 1

Another way to do it without modifying IFS:

read -r -a myarray <<< "${string//, /$IFS}"

Rather than changing IFS to match our desired delimiter, we can replace all occurrences of our desired delimiter ", " with contents of $IFS via "${string//, /$IFS}".

Maybe this will be slow for very large strings though?

This is based on Dennis Williamson's answer.

Answer 2

Use this:

countries='Paris, France, Europe'
OIFS="$IFS"
IFS=', ' array=($countries)
IFS="$OIFS"

#${array[1]} == Paris
#${array[2]} == France
#${array[3]} == Europe

Answer 3

if you use macOS and can't use readarray, you can simply do this-

MY_STRING="string1 string2 string3"
array=($MY_STRING)

To iterate over the elements:

for element in "${array[@]}"
do
    echo $element
done

Answer 4

Sometimes it happened to me that the method described in the accepted answer didn't work, especially if the separator is a carriage return.
In those cases I solved in this way:

string='first line
second line
third line'

oldIFS="$IFS"
IFS='
'
IFS=${IFS:0:1} # this is useful to format your code with tabs
lines=( $string )
IFS="$oldIFS"

for line in "${lines[@]}"
    do
        echo "--> $line"
done