Re: triviality regarding $# counts

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

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On 2024-04-12 12:09, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> None of that is about $#. $# just counts either characters in a
> string or elements in an array, full stop.
Right, it's a question of getting the splitting correct.
> What you're asking for is a dissertation on how to split text into
> arrays.  I have no idea what you mean by "without spaces" and there's
> no inherent definition of a "paragraph"
I know it, thus the air-quotes, In one of my tests I had three 
consecutive outputs from aptitude written to the array and at some point 
the count was 3, so somehow each separate output got merged into one 
element.
> so the best you could get from
> this is characters, words, and lines -- but even for words you need to
> explain whether you mean "shell words" (separated by $IFS characters)
> or something else, including whether quotes matter.
It is a bit confusing.

>    Further, you seem
> to be starting from scalar text sometimes, and text that's already
> split into an array other times -- in the latter case you have to
> explain whether and how you want the array re-joined into a block of
> text before re-splitting.
I've got a whole bunch of that figured out today.  What I thought were 
arrays were scalars that just happened to print nicely on separate lines 
where wanted but not due to '\n''s.  And what I thought line splitting 
-- (f) -- did was enter '\n's into the body of the variable -- a guy 
might be forgiven for thinking that -- but no it's dollar signs.  And 
efforts to force '\n's' were disastrous. Some quality time with typedef 
-p really helped.  Sorta funny, everything was working fine, but there 
were hidden disasters lurking that surfaced for that most trivial of 
reasons -- but forced me to redo quite a bit of stuff where things 
really are arrays and nevermind the '\n's.  And I get my line counts 
honestly now :-)  One thing: it sure is hard to hang on to blank lines.  
I wish there was some option to default to preserving them.
> The shell is not a word processor and doesn't understand your
> conceptualization of text formatting.
Very true.  But I focus on what I can see and if it looks right it's 
easy to think it is right.  Anyway, thanks to Lawrence much as been 
learned. BTW $# is a very convenient way of detecting how things are 
split, now that I know that scalars always return character counts and 
arrays, element counts.  Easy!

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