I found this.
And I am trying this:
x='some thing' y=(${x//\n/}) And I had no luck, I thought it could work with double backslash:
y=(${x//\\n/}) But it did not.
To test I am not getting what I want I am doing:
echo ${y[1]} Getting:
some thing Which I want to be:
some I want y to be an array [some, thing]. How can I do this?
Another way:
x=$'Some\nstring' readarray -t y <<<"$x" Or, if you don't have bash 4, the bash 3.2 equivalent:
IFS=$'\n' read -rd '' -a y <<<"$x" You can also do it the way you were initially trying to use:
y=(${x//$'\n'/ }) This, however, will not function correctly if your string already contains spaces, such as 'line 1\nline 2'. To make it work, you need to restrict the word separator before parsing it:
IFS=$'\n' y=(${x//$'\n'/ }) ...and then, since you are changing the separator, you don't need to convert the \n to space anymore, so you can simplify it to:
IFS=$'\n' y=($x) This approach will function unless $x contains a matching globbing pattern (such as "*") - in which case it will be replaced by the matched file name(s). The read/readarray methods require newer bash versions, but work in all cases.
\n with \\n in the expansion pattern doesn't work; instead, you have to splice in a \n literal: echo ${x//$'\n'/ }.readarray approach is actually the most robust one, because ($x) is still subject to globbing: if any line happens to be a valid, single-token globbing pattern (e.g., *), it WILL be expanded, if files happen to match. readarray requires bash 4, however; here's the bash 3.2 equivalent (for those on OS X): IFS=$'\n' read -rd '' -a y <<<"$x". Since your post is gaining traction, would you mind adding these findings?
IFS=$'\n' y=($x) parts from your answer! it's broken when $x contains globs (like *, [...], etc.) — I know it can be “fixed” with set -f, but at this point we're fighting against the shell. The semantically correct ways (and bugfree ways) are the readarray/mapfile way and the read way.read command is 1 (e.g., a failure), since the delimiter is not seen at the end of the stream read. The proper way is: IFS=$'\n' read -d '' -ra y < <(printf '%s;\0' "$x"), as mentioned in this answer. Note that in the case of a space-like character (i.e., space, newline or tab character), consecutive delimiters will be considered as a unique one. So the read method is subtly different from the readarray/mapfile method for newlines.There is another way if all you want is the text up to the first line feed:
x='some thing' y=${x%$'\n'*} After that y will contain some and nothing else (no line feed).
What is happening here?
We perform a parameter expansion substring removal (${PARAMETER%PATTERN}) for the shortest match up to the first ANSI C line feed ($'\n') and drop everything that follows (*).
Using sed:
newStr=`sed ":a;N;s/\n/@@@/g" <<< "$variable"` will replace \n by @@@, and to split correctly, then this use before loop:
IFS='@@@' for a in $newStr do ... 
somewould be in${y[0]}, not${y[1]}, once you solve the newline issue.