Read quoted items with spaces into array

Question

Say I have the file foo.txt

"The" "quick brown" "fox" "jumps over" "the" "lazy dog."

I would like to read these "fields" from the file into an array. However my attempt is failing if the field has a space

$ read -a bar < foo.txt

$ echo ${bar[0]}
"The"

$ echo ${bar[1]}
"quick

I have seen answers suggest changing IFS, but this is a single line so that would appear not to help.

Answer 1

Here's a function that will do the job. It might be slow for huge strings, but will do the job all right, with no caveats like arbitrary code execution or path name expansion:

#!/bin/bash

parse_quoted_items() {
    # Return array is parse_quoted_items_ary
    local line=$1
    parse_quoted_items_ary=() parse_quoted_items_error=
    while [[ $line ]]; do
        if [[ $line =~ ^[[:space:]]*\"([^\"]*)\"([[:space:]]+.+|)[[:space:]]*$ ]]; then
            parse_quoted_items_ary+=( "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}" )
            line=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
        else
            parse_quoted_items_error=$line
            return 1
        fi
    done
}

Then you can use as

IFS= read -r line < foo.txt
if parse_quoted_items "$line"; do
    declare -p parse_quoted_items_ary
else
    printf >&2 "There was an error parsing the string at %s\n" "$parse quoted_items_error"
    exit 1
fi

This is not a satisfactory answer, but I doubt there are any (safe) ways that don't explicitly parse the string.