CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
exvance
exvance

Reputation: 1419

Bash: split by comma with special characters

I have a list that is comma delimited like so...

 00:00:00:00:00:00,Bob's Laptop,11111111111111111
 00:00:00:00:00:00,Mom & Dad's Computer,22222222222222222
 00:00:00:00:00:00,Kitchen,33333333333333333

I'm trying to loop over these lines and populate variables with the 3 columns in each row. My script works when the data has no spaces, ampersands, or apostrophes. When it does have those then it doesn't work right. Here is my script:

 for line in $(cat list) 
 do 
    arr=(`echo $line | tr "," "\n"`)
    echo "Field1: ${arr[0]}"    
    echo "Field2: ${arr[1]}"
    echo "Field3: ${arr[2]}"
 done

If one of you bash gurus can point out how I can get this script to work with my list I would greatly appreciate it!

EV

Upvotes: 6

Views: 699

Answers (3)

iruvar
iruvar

Reputation: 23364

Do not read lines with a for loop. Use read instead

while IFS=, read -r -a line;
do 
    printf "%s\n" "${line[0]}" "${line[1]}" "${line[2]}";
done < list

Or, using array slicing

while IFS=, read -r -a line;
do 
    printf "%s\n" "${line[@]:0:3}"; 
done < list

Upvotes: 3

David Wilkins
David Wilkins

Reputation: 584

Can you use awk?

awk -F',' '{print "Field1: " $1 "\nField2: " $2 "\nField3: " $3}'

Upvotes: 3

Sean Bright
Sean Bright

Reputation: 120644

while IFS=, read field1 field2 field3
do
  echo $field1
  echo $field2
  echo $field3
done < list

Upvotes: 5

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