How do I split a string on a delimiter in Bash

Question

I have this string stored in a variable:

IN="bla@some.com;john@home.com"

Now I would like to split the strings by ; delimiter so that I have:

ADDR1="bla@some.com"
ADDR2="john@home.com"

I don't necessarily need the ADDR1 and ADDR2 variables. If they are elements of an array that's even better.

Answer 1

You can set the internal field separator (IFS) variable, and then let it parse into an array. When this happens in a command, then the assignment to IFS only takes place to that single command's environment (to read ). It then parses the input according to the IFS variable value into an array, which we can then iterate over.

IFS=';' read -ra ADDR <<< "$IN"
for i in "${ADDR[@]}"; do
    # process "$i"
done

It will parse one line of items separated by ;, pushing it into an array. Stuff for processing whole of $IN, each time one line of input separated by ;:

 while IFS=';' read -ra ADDR; do
      for i in "${ADDR[@]}"; do
          # process "$i"
      done
 done <<< "$IN"