How can I read words (instead of lines) from a file?

Question

I\'ve read this question about how to read n characters from a text file using bash. I would like to know how to read a word at a time from a file that looks like:

Answer 1

In the context given, where the number of words is known:

while read -r word1 word2 _; do
  echo "Read a line with word1 of $word1 and word2 of $word2"
done

If you want to read each line into an array, read -a will put the first word into element 0 of your array, the second into element 1, etc:

while read -r -a words; do
  echo "First word is ${words[0]}; second word is ${words[1]}"
  declare -p words # print the whole array
done