BASH: Separate a line into words using tr - bash

Question

Part of my Bash assignment includes reading a text file, then separating each line into words and using them.
The words are separated by |, lines are separated by \n. We were told to use the tr command, but I couldn't find an elegant solution.
An example:
Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill
should give:
Hello
My
Name
Is
Bill
One word per iteration.

Answer 1

You only need one invocation of tr to do the job:
$ echo "Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill" | tr -cs '[:alpha:]' '\n'
Hello
My
Name
Is
Bill
$
The -c option is for 'the complement' of the characters in the first pattern; the -s option 'squeezes' out duplicate replacement characters. So, anything that's not alphabetic is converted to a newline, but consecutive newlines are squeezed to a single newline.
Clearly, if you need to keep 'Everyone else | can | call | me | Fred' with the two words in the first line of output, then you have to work considerably harder:
$ echo "Everyone else | can | call | me | Fred" |
> tr '|' '\n' |
> sed 's/ *$//;s/^ *//'
Everyone else
can
call
me
Fred
$
The sed script here removes leading and trailing blanks, leaving intermediate blanks unchanged. You can replace multiple blanks with a single blank if you need to, and so on and so forth. You can't use tr to conditionally replace a given character (to change some blanks and leave others alone, for example).

Answer 2

some other options:
awk:
awk -F'\\| ' -v OFS="\n" '$1=$1'
example:
kent$ echo "Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill" |awk -F'\\| ' -v OFS="\n" '$1=$1'
Hello
My
Name
Is
Bill
grep
grep -o '[^ |]*'
example:
kent$ echo "Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill"|grep -o '[^ |]*'
Hello
My
Name
Is
Bill
sed
sed 's/ | /\n/g'
example:
kent$ echo "Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill" |sed 's/ | /\n/g'
Hello
My
Name
Is
Bil

Answer 3

My favorite perl :)
echo "Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill" | perl -pe 's/\s*\|\s*/\n/g'
will remove the excessive spaces too, so
echo "Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill" | perl -pe 's/\s*\|\s*/\n/g' | cat -vet
will print
Hello$
My$
Name$
Is$
Bill$

Answer 4

Using tr:
echo "Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill" | tr -s '\| ' '\n'
OR if you decide to give awk a chance:
echo "Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill" | awk -F '\|' '{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) {
sub(/ /, "", $i); print $i}}'

Answer 5

This code should do it, converts '|' to newline, remove leading/trailing space:
echo "Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill" | tr '|' '\n' | tr -d [:blank:]

Answer 6

File temp: Hello | My | Name | Is | Bill
$ cat temp | tr '|' '\n' | sed 's/^ *//g'
Hello
My
Name
Is
Bill
$
The sed part gets rid of leading spaces (because there is a space between the '|' and the word. This will also work for "Hello everyone | My | Name | Is | Bill":
$ cat temp | tr '|' '\n' | sed 's/^ *//g'
Hello everyone
My
Name
Is
Bill
$