Split text file into array based on an empty line or any non used character

This script should do what you want:

#!/bin/bashi=1s=1declare -a arrwhile read -r line do    # If we find an empty line, then we increase the counter (i),     # set the flag (s) to one, and skip to the next line    [[ $line == "" ]] && ((i++)) && s=1 && continue     # If the flag (s) is zero, then we are not in a new line of the block    # so we set the value of the array to be the previous value concatenated    # with the current line    [[ $s == 0 ]] && arr[$i]="${arr[$i]}$line" || {             # Otherwise we are in the first line of the block, so we set the value            # of the array to the current line, and then we reset the flag (s) to zero             arr[$i]="$line"            s=0;     }done < filefor i in "${arr[@]}"do   echo "================"   echo "$i"done 

Test file:

$ cat fileasdf dsf s dfsdaf ssadfds fdsa fads f dsaf asfdsafds f dsf ds afd f saf dsfsdfsfs dfadsfsafsdfsafds fdsafads fd saf adsfassdfdsfds fdsfd saf dsa fds fads f

Output:

================asdf dsf s dfsdaf ssadfds fdsa fads f dsaf as================fdsafds f dsf ds afd f saf dsfsdfsfs dfadsfsaf================sdfsafds fdsafads fd saf adsfassdfdsfds fdsfd saf dsa fds fads f

Update:

In order to ignore lines beginning with #, you can add this line after the do:

[[ $line =~ ^# ]] && continue

First of all, by design, variables set with var=foo command are only made available to command and won't be set for the rest of the script.

As for your problem, read reads a record until the first delimiter (-d, default: line feed), and then splits that up into fields by $IFS.

To loop over your items, you can use

sed -e 's/^$/\xBF/' | while read -d $'\xBF' vardo    printf "Value: %s\n-----\n" "$var"done

To read them all into an array from a string, you can read up until some character you hopefully don't have, like a NUL byte:

IFS=$'\xBF' read -d '' -a array <<< "$var"