Loop over space-separated string in zsh

Question

What controls the environment to know to split by space in zsh?

I'm sure it's something simple but in all my searching have yet to figure it out what controls it.

Trying to loop over items in a space-separated string like so:

s='foo bar baz'
for i in $s; do
  echo "$i END"
done
# foo bar baz END

# ---

s='foo bar baz'
a=( $s )
echo ${a[0]} # (empty)
echo ${a[1]} # foo bar baz

# ---

s='foo bar baz'
IFS=' ' read a <<< $s
for i in "${a[@]}"; do
  echo "$i END"
done
# foo bar baz END

The different methods work via sh and bash, but in a shell with oh-my-zsh I'm unable to separate by space, getting the results above. May not be oh-my-zsh - but looking to understand what drives this.

Working example from bash:

s='foo bar baz'
for i in $s; do
  echo "$i END"
done
# foo END
# bar END
# baz END

user_387076 · Answer

Zsh and bash are two different programming languages. They're similar, but not identical. In bash, and more generally in Bourne-style shells (sh, dash, ksh, …), an unquoted variable expansion $foo does the following:

Take the value of the variable foo, which is a string. (If there is no variable foo, take the empty string.)
Split the string into whitespace-separated parts. (More generally, the value of the IFS variable determines how the string is split; I won't go into all the details here.) The result is a list of strings.
For every element in the list, if it is a globbing pattern, i.e. if it contains at least one wildcard character *?\[ (and possibly more depending on some shell options), and that pattern matches at least one file name, then the element is replaced by the list of matching file names. Elements that don't contain any wildcard character, and elements that contain a wildcard character but don't match any file name, are left alone. The result is again a list of strings.

Zsh is mostly a Bourne-style shell, but it has some differences, and this is the main one: $foo has the following, simpler behavior.

Take the value of the variable foo, which is a string. (If there is no variable foo, take the empty string.)
If this results in an empty word, this word is eliminated. (So for example $foo$bar is only eliminated if both foo and bar are empty or unset.)

Note that in sh or bash, $foo only works to split a string if it doesn't contain any wildcard character or if globbing is disabled with set -f.

To split a string at whitespace in zsh, there are two simple methods:

Use the = parameter expansion specified to apply IFS word splitting. For example $=foo splits at whitespace as determined by IFS.
Use the p parameter expansion flag. For example ${(p: :)foo} splits at spaces (not tabs or newlines).

This has nothing to do with oh-my-zsh, which is a plugin to configure zsh for interactive use.

Loop over space-separated string in zsh

1 Answers