You have some parsing to do and for whatever reason nothing else will do—you need to take your strings apart one character at a time.
The substring function for variables will let you take things apart and another feature tells you how long a string is:
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#!/usr/bin/env bash # cookbook filename: onebyone # # parsing input one character at a time while read ALINE do for ((i=0; i < ${#ALINE}; i++)) do ACHAR=${ALINE:i:1} # do something here, e.g. echo $ACHAR done done |
The read will take input from standard in and put it, a line at a time, into the variable $ALINE.
Since there are no other variables on the read command, it takes the entire line and doesn’t divvy it up.
The for loop will loop once for each character in the $ALINE variable. We can compute how many times to loop by using ${#ALINE}, which returns the length of the contents of $ALINE.
Each time through the loop we assign ACHAR the value of the one-character substring of ALINE that begins at the ith position.
That’s simple enough. Now, what was it you needed to parse this way?
