How do I split a string on a delimiter in Bash?

Question

I have this string stored in a variable:

IN=\"bla@some.com;john@home.com\"

Now I would like to split the strings by ; delimite

Answer 1

Taken from Bash shell script split array:

IN="bla@some.com;john@home.com"
arrIN=(${IN//;/ })

Explanation:

This construction replaces all occurrences of ';' (the initial // means global replace) in the string IN with ' ' (a single space), then interprets the space-delimited string as an array (that's what the surrounding parentheses do).

The syntax used inside of the curly braces to replace each ';' character with a ' ' character is called Parameter Expansion.

There are some common gotchas:

1. If the original string has spaces, you will need to use IFS:
   • IFS=':'; arrIN=($IN); unset IFS;
2. If the original string has spaces and the delimiter is a new line, you can set IFS with:
   • IFS=$'\n'; arrIN=($IN); unset IFS;