[ale] If there a neat way of peeling apart bash variable by delimters?

[neal at mnopltd.com (Neal Rhodes)]

If in a shell script, you have a variable loaded with a character value,
and there is a delimiter, and you want to peel it apart by that
delimiter, is there a built-in expression to do that? 

Here's what I'm doing, and I'm thinking there should be a better way. 

        FULLNAME=$1                                  #eg:
CustomerEntry.CreditLimit
        DOT=`expr index $FULLNAME .`
        DOTM1=`expr $DOT - 1`
        TABLE=${FULLNAME:0:$DOTM1}             
        FIELD=${FULLNAME:$DOT:40}              


Neal Rhodes
President, MNOP Ltd
Lilburn, GA
770-972-5430
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