I have a variable in my shell script of the form
myVAR = "firstWord###secondWord"
I would like to use grep or some other tool to separate into two variables such that the final result is:
myFIRST = "firstWord"
mySECOND = "secondWord"
How can I go about doing this? #{3} is what I want to split on.
Using substitution with sed:
echo $myVAR | sed -E 's/(.*)#{3}(.*)/\1/'
>>> firstword
echo $myVAR | sed -E 's/(.*)#{3}(.*)/\2/'
>>> secondword
# saving to variables
myFIRST=$(echo $myVAR | sed -E 's/(.*)#{3}(.*)/\1/')
mySECOND=$(echo $myVAR | sed -E 's/(.*)#{3}(.*)/\2/')
-r which is extended regex, I guess you are using linux then... -E is more portable (supported on Mac ect where -r isn't). My preference is -r but always use -E when answering question if the platform is unknown... It's always confused my why the man pages don't say it's supported.The best tool for this is sed :
$ echo "firstWord###secondWord" | sed 's@###@\
@'
firstWord
secondWord
A complete example :
$ read myFIRST mySECOND < <(echo "$myvar" | sed 's@###@ @')
$ echo $myFIRST
firstWord
$ echo $mySECOND
secondWord
$ STR='firstWord###secondWord'
$ eval $(echo $STR | sed 's:^:V1=":; /###/ s::";V2=": ;s:$:":')
$ echo $V1
firstWord
$ echo $V2
secondWord
This is how I would do it with zsh:
myVAR="firstWord###secondWord"
<<<$myvar sed 's/###/ /' | read myFIRST mySECOND
