How to parse an array, that uses space delimiter, and has spaces in the values?

Assumptions:

• OP wants to capture each item (returned by dialog) as a separate element in a bash array named CHOICES

First item of interest:

CHOICES="$("${cmd[@]}" "${DIALOG_OPTIONS[@]}" 2>&1 1>/dev/tty)" 

This does not populate an array but rather populates the CHOICES variable with a single string of text (in this case the output from the dialog call):

$ typeset -p CHOICES declare -- CHOICES="\"Example Item 1\" \"Example Item 2\" \"Example Item 3\"" 

The normal approach for populating an array would look like:

CHOICES=( $("${cmd[@]}" "${DIALOG_OPTIONS[@]}" 2>&1 1>/dev/tty) ) 

But upon pushing this change into OP's code we find ourselves with the following array structure:

$ typeset -p CHOICES declare -a CHOICES=([0]="\"Example" [1]="Item" [2]="1\"" [3]="\"Example" [4]="Item" [5]="2\"" [6]="\"Example" [7]="Item" [8]="3\"") 

Primary issue appears to be that dialog is passing the data back in a format that bash cannot (easily) parse into 3 array elements.

While it's possible to write some (bash) code to manually parse the dialog results into 3 separate elements, let's first see if dialog has any flags for passing the data back in a format that's easier to parse in bash. From man dialog I found the following:

--separate-output For certain widgets (buildlist, checklist, treeview), output result one line at a time, with no quoting. This facilitates parsing by another program. 

Since OP's code is using the checklist widget (--checklist) this looks like a possible solution. (NOTE: another option that may work, especially if using something other than the buildlist/checklist/treeview widgets, would be --output-separator.)

If we add --separate-output to OP's cmd=( ... ) construct, and switch back to OP's original string population of the CHOICES variable, we see that our selected items are in fact returned on separate lines:

cmd=(dialog --colors --clear --separate-output ... ) CHOICES="$("${cmd[@]}" "${DIALOG_OPTIONS[@]}" 2>&1 1>/dev/tty)" $ typeset -p CHOICES declare -- CHOICES="Example Item 1 Example Item 2 Example Item 3" 

We can now make use of the bash builtin mapfile, and process substitution, to capture each of these lines of output as a separate array element:

mapfile -t CHOICES < <( "${cmd[@]}" "${DIALOG_OPTIONS[@]}" 2>&1 1>/dev/tty ) $ typeset -p CHOICES declare -a CHOICES=([0]="Example Item 1" [1]="Example Item 2" [2]="Example Item 3") $ for choice in "${CHOICES[@]}"; do echo "you chose: ${choice}"; done you chose: Example Item 1 you chose: Example Item 2 you chose: Example Item 3 

As for the exitStatus issue ...

Capturing the return status of a process substitution requires a bit of wrangling. (A web search on bash return status process substitution should bring up a wide range of approaches.)

We'll take a simple approach and just write the return/exit code to a local file (.exit_status):

mapfile -t CHOICES < <( "${cmd[@]}" "${DIALOG_OPTIONS[@]}" 2>&1 1>/dev/tty; echo $? > .exit_status ) read -r exitStatus < .exit_status #rm .exit_status # uncomment line to remove the file 

NOTES:

• in my testing, upon selecting the extra button (Select All), OP's current code will
• set exitStatus=3
• fail to set the checkboxes (if originally unchecked)
• then issue a recursive call to the load_dialog() function
• I'll leave it up to OP to debug/troubleshoot the (wrong?) behavior of not setting the checkboxes

Net changes to OP's current code:

• add --separate-output to the cmd=(dialog --colors ....) array definition
• replace CHOICES="$("${cmd[@]}" "${DIALOG_OPTIONS[@]}" 2>&1 1>/dev/tty)"
• with mapfile -t CHOICES < <( "${cmd[@]}" "${DIALOG_OPTIONS[@]}" 2>&1 1>/dev/tty; echo $? > .exit_status )
• replace exitStatus=$?
• with read -r exitStatus < .exit_status
• [optional] remove the local file (rm .exit_status)
• remove all the shenanigans with changing IFS (this is not needed and just clutters up the code)
• eliminate word splitting on white space by wrapping variable references in double quotes: ${CHOICES[@]} becomes "${CHOICES[@]}"; $CHOICE becomes "$CHOICE"
• while optional for other variables (in this case) it's a good habit to get into of wrapping all variable references in double quotes, eg, $exitStatus becomes "$exitStatus"