Question

I’m trying to create arrays from strings that have pipe (“|”) as delimiters and include spaces. I’ve been looking around for a while and I’ve gotten close thanks to sources like How do I split a string on a delimiter in Bash?, Splitting string into array and a bunch more. I’m close but it’s not quite working. The two main problems are that there are spaces in the strings, there are starting and ending delimiters, and some of the fields are blank. Also, instead of just echoing the values, I need to assign them to variables.
Here’s the format of the source data:

|username|full name|phone1|phone2|date added|servers|comments|

Example:

|jdoe | John Doe| 555-1212 | |1/1/11 |  workstation1, server1 | added by me |

Here’s what I need:

Username: jdoe
Fullname: John Doe
Phone1: 555-1212
Phone2: 
Date_added: 1/1/11
Servers: workstation1, server1
Comments: guest account

Edit: I use sed to strip out the first and last delimiter and spaces before and after each delimiter, input is now:

jdoe|John Doe|555-1212||1/1/11|workstation1, server1|added by me

Here’s things I’ve tried:

oIFS="$IFS"; IFS='|'
for line in `cat $userList`; do
  arr=("$line")
  echo "Username: ${arr[0]}"  #not assigning a variable, just testing the output
  echo "Full Name: ${arr[1]}"
  echo "Phone 1: ${arr[2]}"
  echo "Phone 2: ${arr[3]}"
  # etc..
done
IFS="$oIFS"

Output:

Username: 
Full Name: 
Phone 1:
Phone 2:
Username: jdoe
Full Name: 
Phone 1:
Phone 2:
Username: John Doe
Full Name: 
Phone 1:
Phone 2:

Another thing I tried:

for line in `cat $userList`; do
  arr=(${line//|/ })
  echo "Username: ${arr[0]}"
  echo "Full Name: ${arr[1]}"
  echo "Phone 1: ${arr[2]}"
  echo "Phone 2: ${arr[3]}"
  # etc
done

Output:

Username: jdoe
Full Name: John
Phone 1:
Phone 2:
Username: Doe
Full Name: 555-1212
Phone 1:
Phone 2:

Any suggestions? Thanks!!

Answer 1

Your first attempt is pretty close. The main problems are these:

• for line in `cat $userList` splits the file by $IFS, not by line-breaks. So you should set IFS=$'\n' before the loop, and IFS='|' inside the loop. (By the way, it’s worth noting that the for ... in `cat ...` approach reads out the entire file and then splits it up, so this isn’t the best approach if the file can be big. A read-based approach would be better in that case.)
• arr=("$line"), by wrapping $line in double-quotes, prevents word-splitting, and therefore renders $IFS irrelevant. It should just be arr=($line).
• Since $line has a leading pipe, you either need to strip it off before you get to arr=($line) (by writing something like $line="${line#|}"), or else you need to treat arr as a 1-based array (since ${arr[0]}, the part before the first pipe, will be empty).

Putting it together, you get something like this:

oIFS="$IFS"
IFS=$'\n'
for line in `cat $userList`; do
  IFS='|'
  arr=($line)
  echo "Username: ${arr[1]}"  #not assigning a variable, just testing the output
  echo "Full Name: ${arr[2]}"
  echo "Phone 1: ${arr[3]}"
  echo "Phone 2: ${arr[4]}"
  # etc..
done
IFS="$oIFS"

(Note: I didn’t worry about the fields’ leading and trailing spaces, because of the “I can do that step separately” part . . . or did I misunderstand that? Do you need help with that part as well?)