How to iterate over text file having multiple-words-per-line using shell script?

Question

I know how to iterate over lines of text when the text file has contents as below:

abc  
pqr  
xyz

However, what if the contents of my text fil

Answer 1

If you want to read every word in a file into a single array you can do it like this:

arr=()
while read -r -a _a; do
   arr+=("${a[@]}")
done < infile

Which uses -r to avoid read from interpreting backslashes in the input and -a to have it split the words (splitting on $IFS) into an array. It then appends all the elements of that array to the accumulating array while being safe for globbing and other metacharacters.