How can I join elements of an array in Bash?

Question

If I have an array like this in Bash:

FOO=( a b c )

How do I join the elements with commas? For example, producing a,b,c.

Answer 1

liststr=""
for item in list
do
    liststr=$item,$liststr
done
LEN=`expr length $liststr`
LEN=`expr $LEN - 1`
liststr=${liststr:0:$LEN}

This takes care of the extra comma at the end also. I am no bash expert. Just my 2c, since this is more elementary and understandable

Answer 2

printf solution that accept separators of any length (based on @doesn't matters answer)

#/!bin/bash
foo=('foo bar' 'foo baz' 'bar baz')

sep=',' # can be of any length
bar=$(printf "${sep}%s" "${foo[@]}")
bar=${bar:${#sep}}

echo $bar

Answer 3

awk -v sep=. 'BEGIN{ORS=OFS="";for(i=1;i<ARGC;i++){print ARGV[i],ARGC-i-1?sep:""}}' "${arr[@]}"

or

$ a=(1 "a b" 3)
$ b=$(IFS=, ; echo "${a[*]}")
$ echo $b
1,a b,3