[pizza234]

> The extra overhead and impact on runtime of context switching to load in a new program is non-trivial if you have to loop over it thousands of times

The specification is: "speed does not matter".

The long answer addresses this solution:

  $ string="Los Angeles, London, Belfast, New York"
  $ IFS="," read -r -a array <<< "${string/, /,}"
  
  $ echo ${array[0]}
  Los Angeles
  
  $ echo ${array[1]}
  London

as "not very generic" in point #3, which is correct. Bash simply doesn't support generic splitting by itself (things go downhill quickly once, for example, newlines are introduced, and so on), and if precision/flexibility are priority over speed, then it's better to use standard linux tools.

[jmcnulty]

If you have newlines present then process the data a line at a time, as you would if reading from a file. This is nowhere near as difficult or cumbersome as you're making out.

[pizza234]

One certainly can, but the increase in complexity shows that Bash starts not to be the most effective tool, when performing tasks it isn't designed for (and compare to a full-blown programming language, there are many).