CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellsplit
Goujon
Goujon

Reputation: 37

shell split a string using variable delimiters

My problem is quite simple but I do not manage to solve it:

I have a string that looks like this:

-3445.51692 -7177.16664 -9945.11057

the tricky part is that there could be zero or more withe space between each number and the latter can be either negative or positive, meaning that the string could also be like:

-3445.51692-7177.16664  -9945.11057

or

-3445.51692 7177.16664-9945.11057

(in case of a positive value there is at least one white space that precedes)

and I would like to split this string into three variables that contains each number, e.g.:

a=-3445.51692
b=-7177.16664
c=-9945.11057

Thus, I wanted to use something like

IFS=' -' read -a array <<< "$string"

but I don't know how to specify "zero or more white space". And using "-" as a delimiter removes it from the final result, while I want to keep the sign.

Any ideas ?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 253

Answers (3)

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785108

You can use read -a by injecting a space first:

s='-3445.51692-7177.16664  -9945.11057'
IFS=' ' read -ra arr <<< "${s//-/ -}"
printf "[%s]\n" "${arr[@]}"
[-3445.51692]
[-7177.16664]
[-9945.11057]

Upvotes: 0

Jens
Jens

Reputation: 72639

Canonicalize the input before you do the IFS splitting, i.e. any minus gets a space prepended:

canonicalized_string=$(echo "$string" | sed 's/-/ -/g')
set -- $canonicalized_string   # No need to mess with IFS.
a=$1
b=$2
c=$3

This assumes exactly 3 numbers. In super-compact form:

set -- $(echo "$string" | sed 's/-/ -/g')
a=$1 b=$2 c=$3

Upvotes: 1

Paul Evans
Paul Evans

Reputation: 27577

Simply use sed to add a space infront of every -, Something like:

echo $string | sed 's/-/ -/g'

Upvotes: 0

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