Sentry Answers>Bash>

Split string on delimiter in Bash

Split string on delimiter in Bash

David Y.

—

The ProblemJump To Solution

I have the following string stored in a Bash variable:

Click to Copy
string="Doe, Jane;Smith, John;Bloggs, Joe"

How can I split this string on the ; delimiter in Bash?

The Solution

To split the string in this variable, we can temporarily set Bash’s input field separator variable (IFS) to the desired delimiter while reparsing it into an array read -ra. For example:

Click to Copy
string="Doe, Jane;Smith, John;Bloggs, Joe"

IFS=";" read -ra names <<<"$string"

for name in "${names[@]}"; do
  echo "$name"
done

This code will produce the following output:

Click to Copy
Doe, Jane
Smith, John
Bloggs, Joe

In our read command, the -a flag creates an array, and the -r flag prevents backslashes from escaping any characters in the string.

A simpler way to achieve this would be to use the cut command, but this requires us to know the number of elements in the string, which may not be possible in all cases. The code below produces the same output using cut instead of IFS:

Click to Copy
string="Doe, Jane;Smith, John;Bloggs, Joe"

for index in {1..3}; do
  echo "$string" | cut -d ";" -f $index
done
  • ResourcesWhat is Distributed Tracing
  • Syntax.fm logo
    Listen to the Syntax Podcast

    Tasty Treats for Web Developers brought to you by Sentry. Web development tips and tricks hosted by Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski

    Listen to Syntax

Loved by over 4 million developers and more than 90,000 organizations worldwide, Sentry provides code-level observability to many of the world’s best-known companies like Disney, Peloton, Cloudflare, Eventbrite, Slack, Supercell, and Rockstar Games. Each month we process billions of exceptions from the most popular products on the internet.

learn more about sentryjoin our discord
© 2024 • Sentry is a registered Trademark
of Functional Software, Inc.