Shell Programming and Scripting

Say I've got a string like: data1,data2,data3,data4.

How would I be able to break up the string, so that I have four variables w/ the values data1 data2 data3 data4.

Also, how could I read a string character by character.

I know you can read a sentence word by word by using the
for var in $othervar, but how would you read a string character by character.

Thanks in Advance,
AJ Allmendinger

Say I've got a string like: data1,data2,data3,data4.

How would I be able to break up the string, so that I have four variables w/ the values data1 data2 data3 data4.

Also, how could I read a string character by character.

I know you can read a sentence word by word by using the
for var in $othervar, but how would you read a string character by character.

Thanks in Advance,
AJ Allmendinger

There's surely a more elegant way to do this, but if you have only 4 fields
you can do it with cut:

var1=`cut -d',' -f1 $string`
var2=`cut -d',' -f2 $string`

and so on (the cut command cuts a string into fields delimited by the character
you provide with the -d option).
(the symbols ` surrounding the cut commands are backquotes, they don't
show properly on my browser)

You can set IFS=,
However setting IFS can cause problems with other programs.

Another way:

Code:

while read a b c d 
do
    print $a $b $c $d
done <`awk ' BEGIN { FS=, }
        { for(i=1;i<NF;i++) {printf " %s", i } printf "\n" }
      '  datafilename `

In ksh, use:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/ksh
IFS=', <tab>'             #in place of <tab> insert actual tab char
string=data1,data2,data3,data4
echo $string | read d1 d2 d3 d4
echo $d1 $d2 $d3 $d4

This is a duplicate post and violates rule 4:
Here is the link for the other thread.

I have merged the threads.