Programming :: Bash Text To Variable Accessing Individual Text Lines?

i am on processing text tasks And i found that if you assign a text to a variable is chomp'ed automatically the newline

Code:

variable=$(cat file.txt)

The problem is i can only access the items/lines using:

Code:

for line in $variable
do
echo $line
# Other commands
done

how do i convert this to an indexed array. More importantly, how do i get access to individual $line[0], ..., $line[n] Another thing, if the file.txt, has lines with spaces it is a mess using the for...in..., but echoing prints line by line...o_0