How to read in csv file to array in bash script

Question

I have written the following code to read in my csv file (which has a fixed number of columns but not a fixed number of rows) into my script as an array. I need it to be a shell script.

usernames   x1    x2   x3  x4
username1,  5     5    4   2
username2,  6     3    2   0
username3,  8     4    9   3

My code

#!/bin/bash
set oldIFS = $IFS
set IFS=,
read -a line < something.csv

another option I have used is

#!/bin/bash
while IFS=$'\t' reaad -r -a line
do 
echo $line
done < something.csv

for both I tried some test code to see what the size of the array line would be and I seem to be getting a size of 10 with the first one but the array only outputs username. For the second one, I seem to be getting a size of 0 but the array outputs the whole csv.

Help is much appreciated!

Note that there must not be any whitespace in variable assignments, so set oldIFS = $IFS should be set oldIFS=$IFS. Also, your sample data is a mixture of comma- and whitespace-separated fields. Is that how your input data is actually looking? If not, please provide an accurate example. — Ansgar Wiechers
– Ansgar Wiechers, Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 9:31

user3159253 · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-10 02:36:37Z

2

You may consider using AWK with a regular expression in FS variable like this:

 awk 'BEGIN { FS=",?[ \t]*"; } { print $1,"|",$2,"|",$3,"|",$4,"|",$5; }'

or this

 awk 'BEGIN { FS=",?[ \t]*"; OFS="|"; } { $1=$1; print $0; }'

($1=$1 is required to rebuild $0 with new OFS)

answered Mar 10, 2014 at 2:36

user3159253

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