Re: Does mapfile support a multibyte character for its delimiter option?

[Robin A. Meade]

OK, thanks Lawrence, Greg, and Chet.

My current workaround is to assume UTF-8 and use a perl one-liner to 
preprocess the input, converting the multibyte delimiter character to NUL:

$ mapfile -d '' -t a < <(echo -n 1¥2¥3¥ | perl -Mutf8 -C -l0 -pe 
'BEGIN{$/="¥"}')


or more concisely:

$ mapfile -d '' -t a < <(echo -n 1¥2¥3¥ | perl -C -0x00A5 -l0 -pe '')


Then I get my desired result:

$ declare -p a
declare -a a=([0]="1" [1]="2" [2]="3")


(The perl one-liner will need adjustments if using an encoding other 
than UTF-8.)

This approach will work as long as I stick to an encoding that has the 
property that a \x00 byte is guaranteed to correspond to U+0000, such as 
UTF-8.