UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

In a shell script, I want to declare an array and subsequently print the elements with tab delimits.

My array has the following structure and arbitrary elements:

Code:

myArray=('fgh' 'ijk' 'xyz' 'abc');

Next, I would like to print it with a '\n' at the end.

Thanks for your input!

~Guss

With bash, try this:

Code:

IFS=$'\t';  printf "%s\n" "${myArray[*]}"
fgh    ijk    xyz    abc

Please note that you'll need to save IFS before and restore it later.

It looks like you are using bash - the array declaration is correct.
The the full syntax is:

Code:

declare -a myArray=( value1 value2 value3 )

Code:

for i in ${myArray[*]}; do  printf "%s\t" $i; done

Note this works correctly for your example -- if your array elements have tabs or spaces in them it will not work

in that case something like this using very basic syntax:

Code:

cnt=0
while [  $cnt -lt ${#myArray[*]} ]
do
     printf "%s\t"  "${myArray[i]}"
     cnt=$(( $cnt + 1  ))
done
echo ""

Note: RudiC's note is more elegant - but this is the stuff you need to understand about iterating through an array.