Hey everyone! I'm looking for some help on a Bash scripting issue. I want to take an input string and break it down into two separate variables: one for the title and another for the tags. The title is always located before the tags and can consist of multiple words. For instance, if I have a string like:
This is the title of the input string +These +are +the +tags
I want to parse this into two variables as follows:
TITLE="This is the title of the input string"
TAGS="These are the tags"
Can anyone provide a solution or guidance on how to achieve this? Thanks in advance!
4 Answers
Another simple method is to use the `read` command with a delimiter. You can convert the string using the `+` sign:
```bash
str='This is the title of the input string +These +are +the +tags'
read -d '' TITLE TAGS <<< "$str"
TAGS="${TAGS//+/' '}`
```
It’s efficient and easy to understand!
You might want to consider efficiency as well. If you're doing this multiple times, using Bash built-in commands is usually faster than external commands. Here’s how to do it efficiently:
```bash
if (( BASH_VERSINFO[0] < 4 || ( BASH_VERSINFO[0] == 4 && BASH_VERSINFO[1] = 4.4'
exit 1
fi
str='This is the title of the input string +These +are +the +tags'
[[ $str == '+'* ]] && str=' '$str
readarray -d '' -t < <(sed 's/+/
/g' <<< "$str")
TITLE=${MAPFILE[0]}
TAGS=${MAPFILE[@]:1}
```
This method allows you to directly manipulate the string effectively!
You can use string manipulation to get this done quite easily! Here’s a simple way to split the string:
```bash
str="This is the title of the input string +These +are +the +tags"
TITLE="${str%%+*}"
if [[ "$str" == *+* ]]; then
TAGS="+${str#*+}"
else
TAGS=
fi
# To clean up the tags further:
TAGS="${TAGS//+}"
```
This should give you the output you need!
If you don't want to rely on the `+` separator, you could iterate through the words directly:
```bash
string="This is the title of the input string +These +are +the +tags"
TITLE=""
TAGS=""
for word in $string; do
case "$word" in
'+'*) TAGS+="${word#+} " ;;
*) TITLE+="$word " ;;
esac
done
```
Just keep in mind that this does not preserve the original spacing between words!
You could also read the tags into an array instead of having them as a single string:
```bash
str="This is the title of the input string +These +are +the +tags"
TITLE="${str%%+*}"
IFS=" +" read -ra tags <<< "${str#*+}" ``` You can check the tags like this: ```bash declare -p tags ```