I have a string in the next format
id;some text here with possible ; inside
and want to split it to 2 strings by first occurrence of the ;. So, it should be: id and some text here with possible ; inside
I know how to split the string (for instance, with cut -d ';' -f1), but it will split to more parts since I have ; inside the left part.
cut sounds like a suitable tool for this:
bash-4.2$ s='id;some text here with possible ; inside'
bash-4.2$ id="$( cut -d ';' -f 1 <<< "$s" )"; echo "$id"
id
bash-4.2$ string="$( cut -d ';' -f 2- <<< "$s" )"; echo "$string"
some text here with possible ; inside
But read is even more suitable:
bash-4.2$ IFS=';' read -r id string <<< "$s"
bash-4.2$ echo "$id"
id
bash-4.2$ echo "$string"
some text here with possible ; inside
read since i'm using bash. Thank you @manatwork!
cut approach will only work when "$s" doesn't contain newline characters. read is in any Bourne-like shell. <<< is in rc, zsh and recent versions of bash and ksh93 and is the one that is not standard.
-a for some reason when mentioning bash's read. (Evidently of no use here.)
-f 2- in the string="$( cut -d ';' -f 2- <<< "$s" )"; echo "$string" command. This is what ignores the rest of the delimiters in the string for the printout. Not obvious when looking at the man page of cut
With any standard sh (including bash):
sep=';'
case $s in
(*"$sep"*)
before=${s%%"$sep"*}
after=${s#*"$sep"}
;;
(*)
before=$s
after=
;;
esac
read based solutions would work for single character (and with some shells, single-byte) values of $sep other than space, tab or newline and only if $s doesn't contain newline characters.
cut based solutions would only work if $s doesn't contain newline characters.
sed solutions could be devised that handle all the corner cases with any value of $sep, but it's not worth going that far when there's builtin support in the shell for that.
Solution in standard bash:
text='id;some text here with possible ; inside'
text2=${text#*;}
text1=${text%"$text2"}
echo $text1
#=> id;
echo $text2
#=> some text here with possible ; insideDD
text1=${text%";$text2"} to remove the trailing ; in $1text
$text not containing ;, you'll end up with both $text1 and $text2 containing $text. You'd need text1=${text%%;*}; text2=${text#"$text1"}; text2=${text2#;}, or handle it as a special case like in my answer.
As you have mentioned that you want to assign the values to id and string
first assign your pattern to a variable(say str)
str='id;some text here with possible ; inside'
id=${str%%;}
string=${str#;}
Now you have your values in respective variables
some_command ,then your pattern will get stored in $1 and use the above code with 1 instead of str
${str%%;*} for id and ${str#*;} for str (with the asterisks). This is an old answer though so perhaps this worked on older versions of bash, but these changes were required for me on bash 4.2+ (and possibly earlier, I did not test).
In addition to the other solutions, you could try something regex based:
a="$(sed 's/;.*//' <<< "$s")"
b="$(sed 's/^[^;]*;//' <<< "$s")"
or depending on what you are trying to do exactly, you could use
sed -r 's/^([^;]*);(.*)/\1 ADD THIS TEXT BETWEEN YOUR STRINGS \2/'
where \1 and \2 contain the two substrings you were wanting.
idandstring