Check exact match of a word in a line in shell script

Question

A variable holds the string as, nameList="abc bcd bcde cdefg" and another variable has string as, checkname="bcd".

Now i have to check if $checkname is present in $nameList or not. It should search for exact value only.

For eg. if we check for "bcd" it should throw yes, if we check for "bc" it should throw no. I need this condition check in "if" condition

Thanks.

all the above are checking for complete line, but not a substring in that line — impika, Nov 28 '19 at 10:49
To check for a space-separated literal word, try `case " $nameList " in *" $checkname "*) echo yes;; esac` - notice the quoted spaces. — tripleee, Nov 28 '19 at 11:09
@impika Yeah, they do. Sorry for the wrongly marked duplicate. I was mislead by your formulation `exact value only`. I voted to reopen the question. — Socowi, Nov 28 '19 at 16:24

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 28 '19 at 10:48

0

a simple for loop could do this :

for word in $nameList 
do 
   if [ "$checkname" == "$word" ] 
   then 
        echo found 
        break  
   fi
done

answered Nov 28 '19 at 10:48

nullPointer

It works, so does it mean a string with spaces will be treated like an array? – impika Nov 28 '19 at 10:54
In this case the for loop considers spaces as word separators, so it basically does word splitting. – nullPointer Nov 28 '19 at 11:02
Ok good. Thanks. – impika Nov 28 '19 at 11:05

1 Answers1