Unable to separate semi-colon separated line awk - bash

Question

I am trying to do the following:
Read a file line by line.
Each line has the following structure: field1;field2;field3
Use awk to separate each of these fields and then process each of these fields further
The snippet of code I have is:
while read l
do
n=`echo ${l} | awk --field-separator=";" '{print NF}'`
field1=`echo ${l} | awk --field-separator=";" '{print $1}'`
field2=`echo ${l} | awk --field-separator=";" '{print $2}'`
field3=`echo ${l} | awk --field-separator=";" '{print $3}'`
echo ${n} ${field1} ${field2} ${field3}
done < temp
Where temp contains only the following line:
xx;yy;zz
The answer I get on the command line is:
1 xx;yy;zz
I am not sure I understand this output. Any explanations would be nice, given that it does work for other files. I am working on a Mac while this code uses awk within a bash script.

Answer 1

Why awk when you can do it in pure bash?
while IFS=';' read -r field1 field2 field3; do
echo "Field1: $field1"
echo "Field2: $field2"
echo "Field3: $field3"
done < file.txt
Or if you don't know the field count:
while IFS=';' read -ra fields; do
echo "Number of fields: ${#fields[#]}"
echo "Field1 ${fields[0]}"
done < file.txt

Answer 2

Your awk has no idea what --field-separator=";" means so when you do this:
awk --field-separator=";" '{print $1}'
your awk is still using the default FS of a space, and so $1 contains your whole input line while $2 and $3 are empty. Use -F';' to set the FS.
You are WAY, WAY off the mark in how to write the script you want. If you tell us more about what "process each field" is, we can help you.

Answer 3

It's probably a bug with your awk. Try other formats like these:
while read l
do
n=`echo "${l}" | awk -F\; '{print NF}'`
field1=`echo "${l}" | awk -F\; '{print $1}'`
field2=`echo "${l}" | awk -F\; '{print $2}'`
field3=`echo "${l}" | awk -F\; '{print $3}'`
echo "${n} ${field1} ${field2} ${field3}"
done < temp
Or
while read l
do
n=`echo "${l}" | awk -v 'FS=;' '{print NF}'`
field1=`echo "${l}" | awk -v 'FS=;' '{print $1}'`
field2=`echo "${l}" | awk -v 'FS=;' '{print $2}'`
field3=`echo "${l}" | awk -v 'FS=;' '{print $3}'`
echo "${n} ${field1} ${field2} ${field3}"
done < temp
Or
while read l
do
n=`echo "${l}" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=";"}{print NF}'`
field1=`echo "${l}" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=";"}{print $1}'`
field2=`echo "${l}" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=";"}{print $2}'`
field3=`echo "${l}" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=";"}{print $3}'`
echo "${n} ${field1} ${field2} ${field3}"
done < temp
Try other awks like mawk or nawk as well.