Multiple values for IFS in shell scripting

Question

I am coding a shell program which needs to have multiple internal field separator values - <newline><tab><.><space> . Is there any way to assign all these to IFS? Also I am not talking about awk here.

Answer 1

In bash you can re-assign those multiple values like this:

IFS=$'\n\t. '

In other shells you have to do it manually or use other external commands to generate it:

IFS="
    . "