This is in response to the original question, you said to use "tr" to add newline but I can't seem to get "tabs" to also be added?

So I get an output with a single tab, and the rest are not tabbed.

Script:

#!/bin/sh

A='text1,text2,text3'

echo -e "Output: \n\t${A}" | tr , '\n'

Output:
        text1
text2
text3

Output:
        text1
        text2
        text3