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

Right now I'm using:

TO_IGNORE=(
    E201 # Whitespace after '('
    E301 # Expected N blank lines, found M
    E303 # Too many blank lines (pep8 gets confused by comments)
)
ARGS="--ignore `echo ${TO_IGNORE[@]} | tr ' ' ','`"

Which works, but (in the general case) will break horribly if array elements have a space in them.

(For those interested, this is a wrapper script around pep8.py)