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

Maybe not the most elegant solution, but works with * and spaces:

IN="bla@so me.com;*;john@home.com"
for i in `delims=${IN//[^;]}; seq 1 $((${#delims} + 1))`
do
   echo "> [`echo $IN | cut -d';' -f$i`]"
done

Outputs

> [bla@so me.com]
> [*]
> [john@home.com]

Other example (delimiters at beginning and end):

IN=";bla@so me.com;*;john@home.com;"
> []
> [bla@so me.com]
> [*]
> [john@home.com]
> []

Basically it removes every character other than ; making delims eg. ;;;. Then it does for loop from 1 to number-of-delimiters as counted by ${#delims}. The final step is to safely get the $ith part using cut.