In a Linux shell how can I process each line of a multiline string?

Question

In my Linux shell I have the string that has the following contents:

cat

dog

bird

I wanted to pass each item as the argument to a different function. How can I do this?

Answer 1

Use this 

cat file | while read -r a; do echo $a; done

where echo $a is whatever you want to do with the current line.

UPDATE: 

If you don't have a file with the multiple lines but have a variable with multiple lines, then use the below code:

echo "$variable" | while read -r a; do echo $a; done

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