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lang-bash
read -ris perfect as splitting the outputs into separate variables is preferable for my actual use case. I liked all 3 answers so far, this is the one i'm going to actually end up using because it can be done conveniently in one line, and I can use parameter expansions in conjunction with this to ensure it's all lowercase which I happen to also need. But I will be marking Stéphane Chazelas's answer as the solution since he answers the question (when taken most literally) best.IFS=: read -ra array <<< "$string"only works for strings that don't contain newline characters (and in some versions of bash are valid text in the user's locale) and discards an empty trailing element. For arbitrary strings, you need more something likeIFS=: LC_ALL=C read -rd '' -a array < <(printf '%s:\0' "$string"as detailed in my answer.