Shell Programming and Scripting

How can I read a string delimited on spaces and assign the fields to incremented variables.
For example:
Given $exts= txt dat mov

I want to read in $exts and have "txt" "dat" and "mov" assigned to incremented variables like $ext1, $ext2, etc. I would like to do this in a loop so that I can read in any any given number of extensions.

I have tried the following:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
#replace
exts=txt dat mov
N=0
while x read "$exts" | cut -d" " -f1
	do
	N=$((N+1))
	echo "ext$N = $x"
done

But this does not work. Any suggestions on how to achieve the desire outcome?
Thanks.

Use array

Code:

#!/bin/bash
exts=( txt dat mov )
for ((i=0;i<${#exts};i++))
do 
     echo ${exts[$i]}
done

This should work in any shell, no arrays required:

Code:

for X in $exts
do
        echo "X is $X"
done

The OP want to create "incremented variables"

Thanks so much. I'll give that a try.