How to loop over grep command results and check condition for each value inside the loop?

Question

So I have a file which has some person's full names (first name and last name) in it on various seperate lines which starts with some specific pattern. With the help of grep command I have succeeded in extracting only the full names and storing it in variable. Now I need to access every full name and check if it matches with some value from another variable. I tried using for loop but it treats first name and last name as seperate items because they have space in between. I need to get first and last name together and check it with other variable.

Eg. After running grep command I get 3 values and are stored in variable names.

Abc xyz
Pqr def
Lmn ghi

Running the for loop as below:

for n in $names; do
 echo $n
   if [ "$n" = "Abc Pqr" ]; then
    echo "something"
   fi
done

Gives following output:

Abc
xyz
Pqr
def
Lmn
ghi

I want $n to have both Abc xyz (first name and last name) together so that I can check the condition.

Answer 1

I formatted your question, including your pseudocode , but the way you are attempting to do this will not work. Your $names variable is not an array, but a single long string with line breaks included. This is how you can iterate over such a string in the future.

This is our sample names.txt file we will grep over to simulate the process

###                 names.txt                  ###
### our sample file to grep over as an example ###
##################################################
Abc xyz
Pqr def
Lmn ghi

with the code being the following:

names=$(grep -v '^#' names.txt)

i=1;
while read n; do 
  echo "Name $i. $n"
  if [[ "$n" == "Pqr def" ]]; then
      echo "--- $n was found at line $i"
  fi    
  i=$(($i+1)); 
done <<< "$names"

Your output will look like this:

Name 1. Abc xyz
Name 2. Pqr def
--- Pqr def was found on line 2
Name 3. Lmn ghi