How can I join elements of an array in Bash?

Question

If I have an array like this in Bash:

FOO=( a b c )

How do I join the elements with commas? For example, producing a,b,c.

Answer 1

Thanks @gniourf_gniourf for detailed comments on my combination of best worlds so far. Sorry for posting code not thoroughly designed and tested. Here is a better try.

# join with separator
join_ws() { local d=$1 s=$2; shift 2 && printf %s "$s${@/#/$d}"; }

This beauty by conception is

• (still) 100% pure bash ( thanks for explicitly pointing out that printf is a builtin as well. I wasn't aware about this before ... )
• works with multi-character delimiters
• more compact and more complete and this time carefully thought over and long-term stress-tested with random substrings from shell scripts amongst others, covering use of shell special characters or control characters or no characters in both separator and / or parameters, and edge cases, and corner cases and other quibbles like no arguments at all. That doesn't guarantee there is no more bug, but it will be a little harder challenge to find one. BTW, even the currently top voted answers and related suffer from such things like that -e bug ...

Additional examples:

$ join_ws '' a b c
abc
$ join_ws ':' {1,7}{A..C}
1A:1B:1C:7A:7B:7C
$ join_ws -e -e
-e
$ join_ws $'\033[F' $'\n\n\n'  1.  2.  3.  $'\n\n\n\n'
3.
2.
1.
$ join_ws $ 
$