bash

Splitting strings

Taken from ​http://antonolsen.com/2006/04/10/bash-split-a-string-without-cut-or-awk/

BASH: Split a string without ‘cut’ or ‘awk’, that is without the use of non shell commands. This is useful for portability.

    #!/bin/bash
    line=’this “is” a command;this “is” a pattern’
    COMMAND=${line%;*}
    PATTERN=${line#*;}
    echo $COMMAND
    echo $PATTERN

And the output would be:

    this “is” a command
    this “is” a pattern

If you have multiple separator characters, like this:

string1;string2;string3

then you can split it this way:

original=’string1;string2;string3′
part1=${original%%;*}; rest=${original#*;}
part2=${rest%%;*}; rest=${rest#*;}
part3=${rest%%;*};

This should work for arbitrary number of parts.