bash: read string into array bash with spaces preserved

Question

I have string "hi how are you" I want to put this string into an array as shown below. But i want to preserve spaces. Any ideas on how to do that?

    a[0] a[1] a[2]    3   4 5   6     .... should have
     h    i   <space> h   o w <space> .... and so on.

probably not a duplicate, most answers cannot handle spaces... — Karoly Horvath, Jun 06 '13 at 14:54
exactly. I tried to search as much as i could but couldnt find how to handle spaces.; — user2404176, Jun 06 '13 at 15:15

Birei · Answer 1 · 2013-06-06T16:35:51.247

3

One way, sure there will be better solutions but this seems to work for me:

unset arr; IFS=; for c in $(sed 's/./&\n/g' <<<"hi how are you"); do arr+=("$c"); done; echo "${arr[@]}"

It yields:

h
i

h
o
w

a
r
e

y
o
u

edited Jun 06 '13 at 16:35

answered Jun 06 '13 at 14:57

Birei

1

thank you Birei! I guess i am spoilt for choice ! I appreciate your response sir! – user2404176 Jun 06 '13 at 15:14
Thank you, your `IFS=''` trick helped me in my own problem (preserving spaces in an array of filenames)! – Jules Kerssemakers Oct 02 '19 at 08:58

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 06 '13 at 14:53

1

eval a=( $(echo "hi how are you" | sed "s/\(.\)/'\1' /g") )

It's really ugly, maybe somebody can come up with something without eval...

answered Jun 06 '13 at 14:53

Karoly Horvath

do you mind explaining the sed part? – user2404176 Jun 06 '13 at 14:54
run that part alone: `echo "hi how are you" | sed "s/\(.\)/'\1' /g"`. Replaces every character with a quoted one – Karoly Horvath Jun 06 '13 at 14:58
1

silly question! should have done that! Thank you Karoly! That works! cheers! – user2404176 Jun 06 '13 at 15:11

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 06 '13 at 15:00

0

Probably not fast, but avoids the need for sed:

z=()
while read -n 1 x; do
    z+=( "$x" )
done <<<"hi how are you"

answered Jun 06 '13 at 15:00

chepner

3 Answers3