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character-by-character comparison of strings

 
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# 1  
Old 07-26-2010
character-by-character comparison of strings
This might be a dummy question, but is there a command in UNIX that compare two strings character-by-character and display the difference?

---------- Post updated at 11:25 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:32 AM ----------

Or probably what I'm looking is how to break a string into array, such as below for example:

Code:
STRING="Hello"
STRING[0]='H'
STRING[1]='e'
STRING[2]='l'
STRING[3]='l'
STRING[4]='o'

Last edited by Scott; 07-26-2010 at 03:02 AM.. Reason: Code tags
# 2  
Old 07-26-2010
Code:
#!/bin/bash
for((i=0;i<${#STRING};i++)); do echo ${STRING:$i:1}; done

# 3  
Old 07-26-2010
Code:
# i=0;for char in `echo Hello | fold -w 1 ` ; do
STRING[i]=$char
((i++))
done

# 4  
Old 07-26-2010
Code:
IFS=$'\n'
var=$(echo "hello" | fold -w 1)
set -- $var
echo $1
echo $2
echo $3

 
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