Retrieve string between characters and assign on new variable using awk in bash

I’m new to bash scripting, I’m learning how commands work, I stumble in this problem,

I have a file /home/fedora/file.txt

Inside of the file is like this:

[apple] This is a fruit.
[ball] This is a sport's equipment.
[cat] This is an animal.

What I wanted is to retrieve words between “[” and “]”.

What I tried so far is :

while IFS='' read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]];
do
    echo $line | awk -F"[" '{print$2}' | awk -F"]" '{print$1}'
done < /home/fedora/file.txt

I can print the words between “[” and “]”.

Then I wanted to put the echoed word into a variable but i don’t know how to.

Any help I will appreciate.

Answer

Try this:

variable="$(echo $line | awk -F"[" '{print$2}' | awk -F"]" '{print$1}')"

or

variable="$(awk -F'[[]]' '{print $2}' <<< "$line")"

or complete

while IFS='[]' read -r foo fruit rest; do echo $fruit; done < file

or with an array:

while IFS='[]' read -ra var; do echo "${var[1]}"; done < file