Read tab-separated file line into array

Solution 1:

You're very close:

while IFS=$'\t' read -r -a myArray
do
 echo "${myArray[0]}"
 echo "${myArray[1]}"
 echo "${myArray[2]}"
done < myfile

(The -r tells read that \ isn't special in the input data; the -a myArray tells it to split the input-line into words and store the results in myArray; and the IFS=$'\t' tells it to use only tabs to split words, instead of the regular Bash default of also allowing spaces to split words as well. Note that this approach will treat one or more tabs as the delimiter, so if any field is blank, later fields will be "shifted" into earlier positions in the array. Is that O.K.?)

Solution 2:

If you really want to split every word (bash meaning) into a different array index completely changing the array in every while loop iteration, @ruakh's answer is the correct approach. But you can use the read property to split every read word into different variables column1, column2, column3 like in this code snippet

while IFS=$'\t' read -r column1 column2 column3 ; do
  printf "%b\n" "column1<${column1}>"
  printf "%b\n" "column2<${column2}>"
  printf "%b\n" "column3<${column3}>"
done < "myfile"

to reach a similar result avoiding array index access and improving your code readability by using meaningful variable names (of course using columnN is not a good idea to do so).