Parse out key=value pairs into variables

Question

I have a bunch of different kinds of files I need to look at periodically, and what they have in common is that the lines have a bunch of key=value type strings

Answer 1

Since discussion in commentary has made it clear that a pure-bash solution would also be acceptable:

#!/bin/bash
#      ^-- must be /bin/bash, not /bin/sh
#
# ...must also be bash 4.0 or newer.

while read -r -a words; do                # iterate over lines of input
  declare -A vars=( )                  # refresh variables for each line
  set -- "${words[@]}"                 # update positional parameters
  for word; do
    if [[ $word = *"="* ]]; then       # if a word contains an "="...
       vars[${word%%=*}]=${word#*=}    # ...then set it as an associative-array key
    fi
  done
  echo "${vars[Var]} $5"              # Here, we use content read from that line.
done <<<"Version=2 Len=17 Hello Var=Howdy Other"

The <<<"Input Here" could also be , in which case lines in the file would be iterated over.

If you wanted to use $Var instead of ${vars[Var]}, then substitute printf -v "${word%%=*}" %s "${word*=}" in place of vars[${word%%=*}]=${word#*=}, and remove references to vars elsewhere. Note that this doesn't allow for a good way to clean up variables between lines of input, as the associative-array approach does.