I have a requirement to split a string on a multi-character delimiter and return the values into an array in Bash for further processing
IFS can take a single character delimiter.
a="2;AAAAA;BBBBB;1111_MultiCharDel_2;CCCC;DDDDDD;22222_MultiCharDel_2;EEEE;FFFFFFF;22222"
awk'{split($0,ArrayDeltaMulDep,"_MultiCharDel_")}' <<< $a
The input string can have several substrings separated by the MultiCharDel delimiter.
How can i access this array ArrayDeltaMulDep fur further processing in Bash?
Your example string, a, does not contain newlines. If that is true in general, then:
a="2;AAAAA;BBBBB;1111_MultiCharDel_2;CCCC;DDDDDD;22222"
readarray -t b <<< "${a//MultiCharDel/$'\n'}"
We can verify that this split the string properly using declare -p to show the value of b:
$ declare -p b
declare -a b=([0]="2;AAAAA;BBBBB;1111_" [1]="_2;CCCC;DDDDDD;22222")
How it works:
readarray -t b
This reads lines from stdin and puts then in a bash array b.
<<< "${a//MultiCharDel/$'\n'}"
${a//MultiCharDel/$'\n'} uses pattern substitution to replace MultiCharDel with a newline character. <<< provides the result as stdin to the command readarray.
Hat tip: Chepner
A bash string will never contain a null character (hex 00). Using GNU sed:
b=()
while read -d '' -r line
do
b+=("$line")
done < <(sed 's/MultiCharDel/\x00/g; s/$/\x00/' <<<"$a")
This again creates an array with the desired splitting:
$ declare -p b
declare -a b=([0]="2;AAAAA;BBBBB;1111_" [1]="_2;CCCC;DDDDDD;22222")
MultiCharDel. I copy and pasted the string from your comment and, after the second occurrence of Multi, but only the second occurrence, there are two zero-width unicode characters. That prevents the second occurrence from being matched.
readarray -t b <<< "${a//MultiCharDel/$'\n'}" would be far better than an unquoted expansion inside parentheses.while IFS= read -r line; do b+=("$line"); done <<< "${a//MultiCharDel/$'\n'}" in its place.
awk '{split(...); print ArrayDeltaMulDep[3]}<<< $a` for example.Else please clarify your Q with required example output. That is always a good thing to include ;-) .. Good luck.