Shell Programming and Scripting

Thanks alister, your command works fine.
Thanks also for your warning, I will be very touchy with input.

Thanks radoulov for helping but your commands does not work with the sentence in a variable.

Actually I was suggesting to use an array variable instead of scalar variable ...

Yes radoulov, you're right.
Your idea is indeed interesting but I don't think I can easily change my script commands from variable to array.
Your sed example doesn't work with a variable either but I just learned a powerfull command (set).
Thanks for your help anyway.

Hi there,

I don't know if you're still following this thread but I found a way to efficiently use both your ideas.

Because the sentence was read as a string (not an array), I had no other way than using alister's idea:
But I also had a lot of statements to put in my for loop. So it would have become a little messy:

Code:

$ eval "for word in $sentence; do action1 \$word; action2 \$word; action3 \$word; action4 \$word...; done"

At that point, radoulov's idea was interesting because it left the for loop open to any statement:
So I combined the two ideas and came up with this:

Code:

# That's how I read the sentence anyway:
sentence='un "deux trois" quatre'
# Then I turn it into an array:
eval "sentence=($sentence)"
# Et voila!
for word in "${sentence[@]}"; do
    action1 "$word"
    action2 "$word"
    action3 "$word"
    action4 "$word"
    ...
done

Thank you both!