Jtdylktuy

I have a string -w o rd.

I need to split it to w o r d or to an array for 'w' 'o' 'r' 'd'
it doesn't really matter.

I have tried the following

IFS='- ' read -a string <<< "-w o rd"  

echo ${string[*]}

rd isn't getting split. How can I make it get split

You can't use IFS in bash to split on nothing (it has to be on a character). There's no characters between r and d in rd. No space and no character isn't the same as the null character.

If you want each character as a separate element in the array, one way I can think of is to read each character individually and append it to an array (and using IFS to get rid of spaces and -):

bash-4.4$ while IFS=' -' read -n1 c ; do [[ -n $c ]] && foo+=("$c"); done <<<"-w o rd"

bash-4.4$ declare -p foo

declare -a foo=([0]="w" [1]="o" [2]="r" [3]="d")

You can remove the unwanted characters with ${var//pattern/replacement}:

s='-w o rd'

s=${s//[- ]}

And then use the substring expansion to pick one character at a time:

$ for ((i=0; i < ${#s}; i++)); do

      echo ${s:i:1};           # or do whatever you like here

  done

(it even seems to work with multi-byte characters, at least on my system.)

Note that IFS='- ' will assign a literal backslash to IFS as backslash has no special meaning within single quotes. The octal escape would work within $'...', but variables in Bash can't contain a NUL byte, so that doesn't help.
(The string gets cut on the NUL, so e.g. x=$'foobar'; printf "%qn" "$x" prints just foo. Also, what @muru said, splitting on a NUL byte is not the same as splitting between every character)

If your string isn't too long:

w='-w o rd baa'

w=${w//[!a-z]}  # strip anything but lower case letters

eval echo '${w:'{0..10}':1}'

eval array=( '${w:'{0..10}':1}' )

echo "${array[@]}"



w o r d b a a

You can turn the silly thing into something nastier, IFS- and glob-safe and which takes into account the differences in the relative order of the brace and variable expansions between zsh, bash and ksh:

args(){ printf '<%s> ' "$@"; echo; }

w='-e a * () n peek

    fo*"x'"'q"

eval eval args "'"${w:'{0..$((${#w}-1))}':1}"'"

eval eval 'array=(' "'"${w:'{0..$((${#w}-1))}':1}"'" ')'

args "${array[@]}"



<-> <e> < > <a> < > <*> < > <(> <)> < > <> <n> < > <p> <e> <e> <k> <

> <     > <f> <o> <*> <"> <x> <'> <q>    

But franky, the only use of such monstrosity may be to scare off newbies and impress fools with assumed deep knowledge of shell language minutiae ;-)