using a variable which has content separated by spaces in shell in a for loop

Question

I am trying to read a variable with spaces on prompt and trying to use in a for loop.,

For example:

Enter the items to read separated by space...  
apple orange kiwi  

read items  

for i in "$items"  
do  
echo $i  
...(additional operations)....  
done  

But shell does take the first item - apple here. What am I missing here.

Answer 1

remove the double quotes around the $items:

items="apple orange kiwi"

for i in $items
do
  echo $i
done

double-quotes in bash are a way to designate "this is one string, treat it as such" so when you do for i in "$items" it expands $items and becomes "apple orange kiwi" but for in bash by default takes multiple strings and loops over them.

That is also why the initial items definition needs double quotes: variable definition in bash takes a single string, not multiple