Break string into array and pick an element randomly in bash

Question

The purpose of this is basically create a deck of cards and randomly draw 1. Right now, it's not even breaking up the strings and reading them into the array. I get both a command not found for the suites and the denominations string and then another error for RANDOM.

Am I writing in the IFS line wrong? I'm brand new to bash scripting and I really appreciate everyone's help =]!

#!/bin/bash
# Count how many elements.
Suites=“Clubs Diamonds Hearts Spades”
Denominations=“2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Jack Queen King Ace”
# Read into array variable.
IFS=' '
suite=($Suites)
denomination=($Denominations)
# Count how many elements.
num_suites=${#suite[*]}
num_denominations=${#denomination[*]}
echo -n "${denomination[$((RANDOM%num_denominations))]} of "
echo ${suite[$((RANDOM%num_suites))]}
exit 0

This is working for me. I get no errors, and on a few runs, I see echoed: Queen of Spades; Ace of Clubs; 7 of Hearts. This is with bash 4.2.24. — Joshua D. Boyd
– Joshua D. Boyd, Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 0:03
That's weird... how are you running it? I'm using Ubuntu and in the terminal, I type chmod a+rx cards.sh then ./cards.sh to run it. — Hokerie
– Hokerie, Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 0:06

Joshua D. Boyd · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-29 00:09:29Z

2

#!/bin/bash
# Count how many elements.
Suites="Clubs Diamonds Hearts Spades"
Denominations="2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Jack Queen King Ace"
# Read into array variable.
IFS=' '
suite=($Suites)
denomination=($Denominations)
# Count how many elements.
num_suites=${#suite[*]}
num_denominations=${#denomination[*]}
echo -n "${denomination[$((RANDOM%num_denominations))]} of "
echo ${suite[$((RANDOM%num_suites))]}
exit 0

Here is the script I ran. The one difference I see is that I use " while you used “ and ” on your Suites and Denomination lines. Or, 0x22 versus u+201c and u+201d.

edited Apr 29, 2013 at 0:09

answered Apr 29, 2013 at 0:00

Joshua D. Boyd

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1 Comment

Hokerie Over a year ago

face palm So it was a typo all along. Must've been the auto correct on the word document that that given. Thank you.

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