Check if a Bash array contains a value

Question

In Bash, what is the simplest way to test if an array contains a certain value?

Answer 1

Below is a small function for achieving this. The search string is the first argument and the rest are the array elements:

containsElement () {
  local e match="$1"
  shift
  for e; do [[ "$e" == "$match" ]] && return 0; done
  return 1
}

A test run of that function could look like:

$ array=("something to search for" "a string" "test2000")
$ containsElement "a string" "${array[@]}"
$ echo $?
0
$ containsElement "blaha" "${array[@]}"
$ echo $?
1