Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,

I am a newbie...I would like to have a function which ll check if a file contains valid strings before "=" operator. Just to give you my requirement:
assume my file has content:

hello= gsdgsd sfdsg sgdsg sgdgdg
world= gggg hhhh iiiii
xxxx= pppp ppppp pppp

my requirement is to check each line of the file, get the string before "=" operator, ie in this case hello,world,xxxx. For my requirement say hello,world are valid strings. Hence i need to check if hello,world,xxxx belong to my valid string list, if not then need to return invalid from function. Please help

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