Re: Expand array into multiple elements per item?

[Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com>]

On 13 September 2011 10:57, Peter Stephenson <Peter.Stephenson@csr.com> wrote:
>> Why does neither (i) nor (ii) work?
>
> The main problem is that globbing flags rely on globbing; if there's no
> matching file, it doesn't work.  You'd probably want "oN" in the
> globbing flags to turn off sorting if you did have files.
>
>> 3. I thought I recalled a relatively recent addition to parameter
>> expansion flags for just this use-case.  But I can't seem to find the
>> flag in zsh-4.3.12 patchlevel 1.5346.  Still interested in the answer to
>> the rest, regardless.
>
> You might be thinking of the globbing flag, P.  If you did have files,
> *(P:-id:) would have done what you wanted.  But you don't.  The actual
> effect is a bit bizarre (turning off nomatch):
>
> -id
> a b(P:-id:)
> -id
> c(P:-id:)
> -id
> d e(P:-id:)

One fun thing you can do is use .(e,'reply=(foo bar baz)',) if you
want to use some other globbing flags on your data. It's not
applicable for this problem, at least I can't think of a way. I did
suggest it on irc once for sorting an array by the basename:

22:39 <offbyone> I want to sort this by basename so that I order the
elements in this pair of expansions asciibetically regardless of the
directory they're found in.
22:39 <offbyone> (so, for example, if I had A/02_something
B/01_something B/03_something, it'd come out as B/01_something
A/02_something B/03_something)
22:47 <Mikachu> a=( oneglob anotherglob )
22:47 <Mikachu> echo .(e:'reply=($a)':oe,'REPLY=$REPLY:t',)

It would be nice to have a similar mechanism for sorting arrays maybe :).

Oh wait, I just realized it does work, just do this:

% print -l - .(e:'reply=($somelist)':P:-id:)
-id
a b
-id
c
-id
d e

Obviously, this does qualify in the 'a bit of a hack' category. (And
yes, it does fail if $PWD is chmoded -x, maybe / is a safer bet.)

-- 
Mikael Magnusson