How do I replace : characters with newline?

Question

I looked at a very similar question but was unable to resolve the issue Replace comma with newline in sed

I am trying to convert : characters in a strin

Answer 1

I'll presume that you have the string in a variable already. This uses the parameter expansion substitution operator to replace every : with a newline, which is specified using a $'...'-quoted string. Both features are bash extensions to the standard, and may not work in another shell.

$ foo="this:is:a:test"
$ bar="${foo//:/$'\n'}"
$ echo "$bar"
this
is
a
test