Re: Associative Arrays

[Stephane Chazelas <Stephane.Chazelas@morse.com>]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 09:53:48PM +0200, Nikolai Weibull wrote:
> I'm have a few questions regarding associative arrays.  What exactly is
> the A flag for parameter expansion for?  I mean, how does one use it,
> and how does one use the AA flag?

Not very useful, except maybe to avoid the use of typeset.

typeset -A a
a=(foo bar)

can be written:

: ${(AA)=a::=foo bar}

> Is there any way to pass an associative array as ONE argument to a
> function and easily deal with it as the same associative array in the
> other function?  The easiest way seems to be the "pass-by-reference"
> technique, where one simply passes the name of the array and then use
> the P flag to deal with it.
> 	nikolai


You could use "${${(@qqkv)A}[*]}"
$ typeset -A A
$ A=("foo" "b bar" \' \" "" q)
$ print -lr "${${(@qqkv)A}[*]}"
'' 'q' 'foo' 'b bar' ''\''' '"'

So that in the function you can have

typeset -A local_hash
eval "local_hash=($1)"

or:

typeset -A local_hash
local_hash=("${(Q@)${(z)1}}")

-- 
Stephane