Re: [Help-bash] Is there a way to read the first empty field in a TSV input?

[Evan Gates]

Greg Wooledge <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 09:39:34AM -0700, Evan Gates wrote:
> > A third option, manually loop. I ran into this recently writing a gopher
> > client in bash where the separator is tab and all other characters are
> > allowed IIRC. My solution was:
> > 
> > 
> > pack() {
> >     printf '%s\t' "$ft" "$disp" "$sel" "$host" "$port" "$search"
> > }
> > 
> > unpack() {
> >     local line
> >     IFS= read -r line
> >     for k in ft disp sel host port search; do
> >         printf -v "$k" %s "${line%%$'\t'*}"
> >         line=${line#*$'\t'}
> >     done
> > }
> 
> OK, yeah.  Another unpack implementation would look something like:
> 
> for k in ft disp sel host port search; do
>   IFS= read -r -d $'\t' "$k"
> done <<< "$line"

Ah, much better. Thanks!