Read tab-separated file line into array
arrays, bash
Solution
You're very close:
while IFS=$'\t' read -r -a myArray
do
echo "${myArray[0]}"
echo "${myArray[1]}"
echo "${myArray[2]}"
done < myfile
(The `-r` tells `read` that `\` isn't special in the input data; the `-a myArray` tells it to split the input-line into words and store the results in `myArray`; and the `IFS=$'\t'` tells it to use only tabs to split words, instead of the regular Bash default of also allowing spaces to split words as well. Note that this approach will treat one or more tabs as the delimiter, so if any field is blank, later fields will be "shifted" into earlier positions in the array. Is that O.K.?)
Problem
I would like to read a file into a script, line by line. Each line in the file is multiple values separated by a tab, I'd like to read each line into an array. Typical bash "read file by line" example; ``` while read line do echo $line; done < "myfile" ``` For me though, myfile looks like this (tab separated values); ``` value1 value2 value3 value4 value5 value6 ``` On each iteration of the loop, I'd like each line to go into an array so I can ``` while read line into myArray do echo myArray[0] echo myArray[1] echo myArray[2] done < "myfile" ``` This would print the following on the first loop iteration; ``` value1 value2 value3 ``` Then on the second iteration it would print ``` value4 value5 value6 ``` Is this possible? The only way I can see is to write a small function to break out the values manually, is there built in support in bash for this?