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 bash, just use space as delimiter (read -d ' '). This method requires some preprocessing to translate newlines into spaces (using tr) and to merge several spaces into a single one (using sed):

{
 tr '\n' ' ' | sed 's/  */ /g' | while read -d ' ' WORD
 do
  echo -n "<${WORD}> "
 done
 echo
} << EOF
Here you have some words, including * wildcards
that don't get expanded,
multiple   spaces   between   words,
    and lines with spaces at the begining.
EOF

The main advantage of this method is that you don't need to worry about the array syntax and just work as with a for loop, but without wildcard expansion.