How can I read a stream of key=value pairs in bash if the values can be empty? - bash

Question

So I have several properties files that contains keys and values in the following format:
Key1=value1
Key2=Value2
etc..
So when I run this command to get the keys:
ssh 172.16.1.1 "grep -v '^#' /src/PTB.properties" | awk -F "=" '{print $1}'
I get the following output
userField
User
srcIP
srcPort
dstIP
dstPort
date
time
And when I run the same command but with {print $2} at the end to get the values:
ssh 172.16.1.1 "grep -v '^#' /src/PTB.properties" | awk -F "=" '{print $2}'
I get the following output:
User-Name
Full-Name
Source-IP-Address
Source-UDP-Port
Target-UDP-Port
Date
Time
So what I want to say is that some keys don't have a value.
That being said, I am running the following command to get those keys and values:
while IFS= read -r line; do
USER_PARAMETERS_KEYS+=( "$line" )
done < <( ssh $ip "grep -v '^#' ${PARAMETER_PATH[$i]}" | awk -F "=" '{print $1}' )
while IFS= read -r line; do
USER_PARAMETERS_VALUES+=( "$line" )
done < <( ssh $ip "grep -v '^#' ${PARAMETER_PATH[$i]}" | awk -F "=" '{print $2}' )
My problem is that USER_PARAMETERS_VALUES is not saving the null values. For example after running this command, there are only 7 items in USER_PARAMETERS_VALUES instead of 8 because the Key dstIP is empty.
Any idea how can I solve this issue? Thanks.

Answer 1

Wouldn't it make more sense to capture the whole line and parse it locally?
while IFS== read -r key value; do
keys+=("$key")
values+=("$value")
done < <(ssh 172.16.1.1 "grep -v '^#' /src/PTB.properties")
This also avoids the race condition you get where the remote file could change between the first and the second time you read it.
Having said that, a minimal change would be to have Awk print quotes around any empty value.