I found set IFS more reliable than use more complicated syntax or functions. Bash For loop is a statement that lets you iterate specific set of statements over series of words in a string, elements in a sequence, or elements in an array.. Bash For Loop. As the guy above me said, space,tab,newline are the default delimiters. Create a bash file named ‘for_list1.sh’ and add the following script. Example: For example if we have a list of names in a variable separated by semi colon (;). The following commands show the uses of parameter expansion for removing space from the starting and end of the string. exmp: string="abc@hotmail.com;xyz@gmail.com;uvw@yahoo.com" I want to split it and save it i | The UNIX and Linux Forums For loop will split the string into words and print each word by adding a newline. P.S. Following are a few points to be noted when comparing strings: A blank space must be used between the binary operator and the operands. inarr=(${a}) If the delimiter is not space and delimiter is a single character or a string consisting of 1 or more of the characters, set the IFS like. IFS=',' inarr=(${a}) For the examples in the question: For the space separated string: $ a="a string separated by space" $ inarr=(${a}) By default, string value is separated by space. How would I delimit a string by multiple delimiters in bash, With awk , set the field delimiter as one or more space/tab or : , and get the third field: awk -F '[[:blank:]:]+' '{print $3}'. Example-1: Iterating a string of multiple words within for loop. If you want to split not by white-space but by any other character, you can temporarily change the IFS variable which determines how Bash recognizes fields and word boundaries. Space or any character can be trimmed easily from the string data by using bash parameter expansion. -z string - True if the string length is zero.-n string - True if the string length is non-zero. i have one string , I want to split that string. We can easily convert this string to an array like below. A string value with spaces is used within for loop. For the record, here is the old solution: # # OLD CODE # Update: Aug/2016: I've encountered a bug in Bash where this splitting doesn't work as expected! – m3nda Aug 25 '15 at 4:08 28 array=( H E L L O ) # you don’t even need quotes array[0] $ = H. if you wanted to accept other ascii chars (say you’re converting to hex for some reason) When we set the IFS variable and read the values, it automatically saved as a string based on IFS values separator. I know how to split the string (for instance, with cut -d ';' -f1), but it will split to more parts since I … Example-1: Trim string data using parameter expansion. how split a string in bash? I have a string in the next format. Bash split string multiple delimiters. And put care about single quotes on IFS because IFS=$"\n" will split also "nn" strings. January 12, 2008 7:21 PM Subscribe using bash, i need to split a variable in two, on whitespace, but with just the first word in one variable, and the rest in the second variable. Following are the topics, that we shall go through in this bash for loop tutorial.. If your input string is already separated by spaces, bash will automatically put it into an array: ex. id;some text here with possible ; inside and want to split it to 2 strings by first occurrence of the ;. You can convert a string to an array using the grammar like. Always use double quotes around the variable names to avoid any word splitting or globbing issues. 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