Split String by Double Back Slashes in Bash

user_4279443 0
Viewed 58

I am trying to split the string by double back slashes in bash and somehow it's not working.

My string is as follow:

abc\\xyz

My Code:

my_str='abc\\xyz'
IFS='\\' read -r -a arr <<< "$my_str"
echo "${#arr[@]}"

I am expecting that the output would be '2' as the length of the array would be 2.

However, I get 3 as a result and when I try to print the array values, I only get 'abc', and the second index remains empty. It seems like something is wrong with my code but I am unable to identify it.

Can anyone please help to resolve the issue?

bash
3 Answers

If there are no spaces in your string you could use bash pattern substitutions to replace pairs of backslashes by a space and assign the result to an indexed array:

$ my_str='abc\\xyz\uvw\\rst\\\012\\\\345'
$ declare -a arr=( ${my_str//\\\\/ } )
$ echo "${#arr[@]}"
5
$ printf '%s\n' "${arr[@]}"
abc
xyz\uvw
rst
\012
345
user_17737980

Perhaps you could try to replace the backslashes on the string fist as showcased in this previous question. However, this would be inefficient for very large strings.

user_163242420

A slightly different take -

$: my_str='abc\\123\\ghi\\\012\\jkl\\foo bar\\\\xyz'
$: IFS='|' read -r -a arr <<< "${my_str//\\\\/\|}"
$: printf "[%s]\n" "${arr[@]}"
[abc]
[123]
[ghi]
[\012]
[jkl]
[foo bar]
[]
[xyz]
user_86565520
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