Associative array sorting

Associative array sorting

[Bart Schaefer]

I was just looking at this in the manual --

a
     Sort in array index order; when combined with 'O' sort in reverse
     array index order.  Note that 'a' is therefore equivalent to the
     default but 'Oa' is useful for obtaining an array's elements in
     reverse order.

Like (o), (a) applies after the param is turned into an ordinary
array, so "equivalent to the default" kind of gets us off the hook,
but this would be the obvious place to attach sorting the associative
array by key rather than by raw hash traversal.

Re: Associative array sorting

[Eric Cook]

On 1/19/24 14:18, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> I was just looking at this in the manual --
>
> a
>       Sort in array index order; when combined with 'O' sort in reverse
>       array index order.  Note that 'a' is therefore equivalent to the
>       default but 'Oa' is useful for obtaining an array's elements in
>       reverse order.
>
> Like (o), (a) applies after the param is turned into an ordinary
> array, so "equivalent to the default" kind of gets us off the hook,
> but this would be the obvious place to attach sorting the associative
> array by key rather than by raw hash traversal.
>

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Re: Associative array sorting

[Mark J. Reed]

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It sounds good, but *a* applies to indexes, not keys, and those aren't the
same thing. Mind, I think that it would be good if, at least for purposes
of expansion flags, indexes and keys *were* unified, so e.g. *k* on a
regular array would return an array of indexes, and *kv* would interleave
indexes with values (like Python enumerate), etc. But that's not the case
today.


On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 11:45 PM Eric Cook <llua@gmx.com> wrote:

> On 1/19/24 14:18, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> > I was just looking at this in the manual --
> >
> > a
> >       Sort in array index order; when combined with 'O' sort in reverse
> >       array index order.  Note that 'a' is therefore equivalent to the
> >       default but 'Oa' is useful for obtaining an array's elements in
> >       reverse order.
> >
> > Like (o), (a) applies after the param is turned into an ordinary
> > array, so "equivalent to the default" kind of gets us off the hook,
> > but this would be the obvious place to attach sorting the associative
> > array by key rather than by raw hash traversal.
> >
>
> Sounds like a good idea to me.
>
>

-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>

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