4 May 2004
Extracting parts of a string
A frequent requirement in shell scripts is to split a string into two or more components. Even in a Bourne shell, external commands are not needed.
Far too often, I see scripts like this:
string="123,456,789" v1=`echo $string | cut -d, -f1` v2=`echo $string | cut -d, -f2` v3=`echo $string | cut -d, -f3`
It uses three calls to an external command (cut)
where none is necessary.
External commands are rarely needed to parse a string in a POSIX shell, and even using a Bourne shell they can often be avoided.
The shell splits strings into words using the value of the Internal Field Separator (IFS) variable as the delimiter, so the same thing can be accomplished in two ways.
The first method uses the positional parameters:
string="123,456,789" oldIFS=$IFS IFS=, set -- $string v1=$1 v2=$2 v3=$3 IFS=$oldIFS
The second reads the values from a here document:
string="123,456,789" IFS=, read v1 v2 v3 <<EOF $string EOF
In bash and ksh, a here string may be used instead:
string="123,456,789" IFS=, read v1 v2 v3 <<< "$string"
Modified 18 Nov 2021