Splitting string by the first occurrence of a delimiter

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.

Answers:

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Method 1

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

Method 2

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.

Method 3

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

Method 4

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

Method 5

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.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0