Make a string from array of Strings

Question

I have a piece of bash code, in which I would like to make a long string from an array of strings.

The bash code is as follows:

# Load all the SNPs
arrSNPsToBeExtracted=( $( cat $indexFileName ) )

arrSNPsString="\""

lenArrSNPsToBeExtracted=${#arrSNPsToBeExtracted[*]} 
si=0
while [ $si -lt $lenArrSNPsToBeExtracted ]
do
    arrSNPsString=${arrSNPsString}"|"${arrSNPsToBeExtracted[$si]}

    #echo $si": "${arrSNPsString}

    let si++
done

arrSNPsString=$arrSNPsString"\""

echo $arrSNPsString

=====================

As you can see, I have a list of SNPs (words):

word1
word2
word3

And I want to make it like this:

"word1|word2|word3"

This string is assigned to arrSNPsString, but I cannot make it happen. What am I doing wrong?

As you can see in the code, the arrSNPsString should get longer, but instead, it takes at the end of the while loop only the last item.

I know it has something to do with local and global environments/variables. I want to extend a global string arrSNPsString in a local loop.

Does someone know How I can solve this problem

Answer 1

I read this in the bash man page:

If the word is double-quoted, ${name[*]} expands to a single word with the value of each array member separated by the first character of the IFS special variable.

so you could replace your loop by :

arrSNPsString="$(IFS="|"; echo "${arrSNPsToBeExtracted[*]}" )"
echo "$arrSNPsString"

I tried this myself directly at the bash prompt :

a[1]=aaaa
a[2]="bbbb cccc"
a[3]=dddd
b="$(IFS="|"; echo "${a[*]}")"
echo "$b"

which prints:

aaaa|bbbb cccc|dddd

Don't mess with IFS, always restore its old value after you have changed it. The $(..) syntax in this code does that for you.