Re: Example function

["Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Jan 26,  4:25pm, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> Subject: Re: Example function
> (One of the things on the associative-array wishlist is "reverse pattern"
> lookup, that is, treat the array keys as patterns and match them against
> the subscript.  Then you could do silly stuff like
> 
> 	typeset -A map
> 	map=('*.(gz|Z)'	zcat
> 	     '*.bz2' 'bzip2 -dc'
> 	     '*.bz' 'bzip -dc'
> 	     '*' '<')
> 	eval ${(q)map[$argv[i]]} '$argv[i]'
> 
> where I'm using (q) as the fictional reverse-pattern query flag; probably
> there's a better letter.)

Incidentally, the reason this isn't there already is that associative arrays
are unordered hashes, so you can't predict _which_ pattern will match the
subscript when you do the query -- '*' might match before '*.bz' is tried.