Bash – Splitting String by First Occurrence of a Delimiter

bashshell-scriptsplitstring

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.

Best Answer

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
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