On Mon, 2 Feb 2026, Davidson wrote: > On Mon, 2 Feb 2026, [email protected] wrote: > >> why bash only, just because >> >> i found this solution that works > > Whole lot of text below, but I see no specification of what OP thinks > a word is. > > So, Too-Long, Did-Not-Read > >> BUT, would one/some of you big brained folks elaborate >> >> >> >> Using =~ and regular expressions, converting a string to an array in a >> single expression: >> >> string="wonkabars" >> [[ "$string" =~ ${string//?/(.)} ]] # splits into array >> printf "%s\n" "${BASH_REMATCH[@]:1}" # loop free: reuse fmtstr >> declare -a arr=( "${BASH_REMATCH[@]:1}" ) # copy array for later >> >> The way this works is to perform an expansion of string which substitutes >> each single character for (.), then match this generated regular >> expression with grouping to capture each individual character into >> BASH_REMATCH[]. Index 0 is set to the entire string, since that special >> array is read-only you cannot remove it, note the :1 when the array is >> expanded to skip over index 0, if needed. Some quick testing for >> non-trivial strings (>64 chars) shows this method is substantially faster >> than one using bash string and array operations. >> >> The above will work with strings containing newlines, =~ supports POSIX >> ERE where . matches anything except NUL by default, i.e. the regex is >> compiled without REG_NEWLINE. (The behaviour of POSIX text processing >> utilities is allowed to be different by default in this respect, and >> usually is.) >> >> >
don't know what he meant https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7578930/bash-split-string-into-character-array
