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up vote 4 down vote favorite

I'm passing data from STDIN into an array using read like so:

prompt$ cat myfile
a "bc" "d e" f
prompt$ read -a arr < myfile

But read doesn't appear to pay attention to the quoted strings and provides me an array of 5 elements:

prompt$ echo ${#arr[@]}
5
prompt$ echo ${arr[@]:0}
a "bc" "d e" f
prompt$ echo ${arr[2]}
"d
prompt$ echo ${arr[3]}
e"

I'm using the default IFS setting: \t\n in bash. There are several ways to accomplish task using different tools, but I'm surprised that read doesn't support quoted strings.

Any other suggestions for getting a delimited list with quotes into an array?

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2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I can't think of a very good way to do what you are asking for, but, if you know that your input file is going to contain space-separated tokens that are valid syntax for bash, then something like the following could work:

declare -a arr="($(<myfile))"
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Thank you for mentioning declare. I'm hesitant to use eval much, but it seems that cat myfile | { while read -r; do declare -a "arr=($REPLY)"; done} will get the job done. – Mr. Dave yesterday
    
At the heart of it, declare -a "arr=($MYVAR)" will do the same with a variable. – Mr. Dave yesterday
    
1_CR: Wow, yes, this makes the command a lot less horrible. I will integrate this into my answer. – dhag yesterday
up vote 3 down vote

Use this:

IFS=$'\n' arr=( $(xargs -n1 <file) )
  • IFS=$'\n' sets bashs internal field separator to newline.
  • arr=( ... ) the array definition.
  • xargs -n1 <file xargs reads the file with a maximum of 1 argument. The string in quotes stay together, because they are read as arguments.

The output (one element per line):

$ printf "%s\n" "${arr[@]}"
a
bc
d e
f
share|improve this answer
    
Nice, I hadn't thought of using xargs, which does respect quotes. – dhag yesterday
    
@dhag xargs can be used by more cases than just to build commands from stdin =) – chaos yesterday

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