I have a string containing many words with at least one space between each two. How can I split the string into individual words so I can loop through them?
The string is passed as an argument. E.g.
${2} == "cat cat file"
. How can I loop through it?
Also, how can I check if a string contains spaces?
–
Did you try just passing the string variable to a
for
loop? Bash, for one, will split on whitespace automatically.
sentence="This is a sentence."
for word in $sentence
echo $word
–
–
I like the conversion to an array, to be able to access individual elements:
sentence="this is a story"
stringarray=($sentence)
now you can access individual elements directly (it starts with 0):
echo ${stringarray[0]}
or convert back to string in order to loop:
for i in "${stringarray[@]}"
# do whatever on $i
Of course looping through the string directly was answered before, but that answer had the the disadvantage to not keep track of the individual elements for later use:
for i in $sentence
# do whatever on $i
See also Bash Array Reference.
–
–
–
After that, individual words in $text will be in $1, $2, $3, etc. For robustness, one usually does
set -- junk $text
shift
to handle the case where $text is empty or start with a dash. For example:
text="This is a test"
set -- junk $text
shift
for word; do
echo "[$word]"
This prints
[This]
[test]
–
–
–
–
–
The probably most easy and most secure way in BASH 3 and above is:
var="string to split"
read -ra arr <<<"$var"
(where arr is the array which takes the splitted parts of the string) or, if there might be newlines in the input and you want more than just the first line:
var="string to split"
read -ra arr -d '' <<<"$var"
(please note the space in -d '', it cannot be left away), but this might give you an unexpected newline from <<<"$var" (as this implicitly adds an LF at the end).
Example:
touch NOPE
var="* a *"
read -ra arr <<<"$var"
for a in "${arr[@]}"; do echo "[$a]"; done
Outputs the expected
as this solution (in contrast to all previous solutions here) is not prone to unexpected and often uncontrollable shell globbing.
Also this gives you the full power of IFS as you probably want:
Example:
IFS=: read -ra arr < <(grep "^$USER:" /etc/passwd)
for a in "${arr[@]}"; do echo "[$a]"; done
Outputs something like:
[tino]
[1000]
[1000]
[Valentin Hilbig]
[/home/tino]
[/bin/bash]
As you can see, spaces can be preserved this way, too:
IFS=: read -ra arr <<<' split : this '
for a in "${arr[@]}"; do echo "[$a]"; done
outputs
[ split ]
[ this ]
Please note that the handling of IFS in BASH is a subject on it's own, so do your tests, some interesting topics on this:
unset IFS: Ignores runs of SPC, TAB, NL and on line starts and ends
IFS='': No field separation, just reads everything
IFS=' ': Runs of SPC (and SPC only)
Some last example
var=$'\n\nthis is\n\n\na test\n\n'
IFS=$'\n' read -ra arr -d '' <<<"$var"
i=0; for a in "${arr[@]}"; do let i++; echo "$i [$a]"; done
outputs
1 [this is]
2 [a test]
while
unset IFS
var=$'\n\nthis is\n\n\na test\n\n'
read -ra arr -d '' <<<"$var"
i=0; for a in "${arr[@]}"; do let i++; echo "$i [$a]"; done
outputs
1 [this]
2 [is]
3 [a]
4 [test]
If you are not used to $'ANSI-ESCAPED-STRING' get used to it, it's a timesaver.
If you do not include -r (like in read -a arr <<<"$var") then read does backslash escapes. This is left as exercise for the reader.
For the second question:
To test for something in a string I usually stick to case, as this can check for multiple cases at once (note: case only executes the first match, if you need fallthrough use multiplce case statements), and this need is quite often the case (pun intended):
case "$var" in
'') empty_var;; # variable is empty
*' '*) have_space "$var";; # have SPC
*[[:space:]]*) have_whitespace "$var";; # have whitespaces like TAB
*[^-+.,A-Za-z0-9]*) have_nonalnum "$var";; # non-alphanum-chars found
*[-+.,]*) have_punctuation "$var";; # some punctuation chars found
*) default_case "$var";; # if all above does not match
So you can set the return value to check for SPC like this:
case "$var" in (*' '*) true;; (*) false;; esac
Why case? Because it usually is a bit more readable than regex sequences, and thanks to Shell metacharacters it handles 99% of all needs very well.
–
–
–
–
–
(A) To split a sentence into its words (space separated) you can simply use the default IFS by using
array=( $string )
Example running the following snippet
#!/bin/bash
sentence="this is the \"sentence\" 'you' want to split"
words=( $sentence )
len="${#words[@]}"
echo "words counted: $len"
printf "%s\n" "${words[@]}" ## print array
will output
words counted: 8
"sentence"
'you'
split
As you can see you can use single or double quotes too without any problem
Notes:
-- this is basically the same of mob's answer, but in this way you store the array for any further needing. If you only need a single loop, you can use his answer, which is one line shorter :)
-- please refer to this question for alternate methods to split a string based on delimiter.
(B) To check for a character in a string you can also use a regular expression match.
Example to check for the presence of a space character you can use:
regex='\s{1,}'
if [[ "$sentence" =~ $regex ]]
echo "Space here!";
–
Thanks for contributing an answer to Stack Overflow!
- Please be sure to answer the question. Provide details and share your research!
But avoid …
- Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers.
- Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience.
To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers.
site design / logo © 2019 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0
with attribution required.
rev 2019.3.8.33007
