Loop through a comma-separated shell variable

Question

Suppose I have a Unix shell variable as below

variable=abc,def,ghij

I want to extract all the values (abc, def and ghij) using a for loop and pass each value into a procedure.

The script should allow extracting arbitrary number of comma-separated values from $variable.

Answer 1

Another solution not using IFS and still preserving the spaces:

$ var="a bc,def,ghij"
$ while read line; do echo line="$line"; done < <(echo "$var" | tr ',' '\n')
line=a bc
line=def
line=ghij