Re: Subscript flag (i) not working correctly on empty strings?

[Philippe Altherr <philippe.altherr@gmail.com>]

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Thanks for the fix.

For the record, I was trying to do something like this:

separator_index=$input[(i):]
> if [[ $separator_index -le $#input ]]; then
>   # Found separator
>   ...
> fi


Currently, an empty input incorrectly triggers the conditional code. To
avoid it, an extra condition for that specific case is required, which is
rather annoying.

In the code above, an alternative would be to use (I) and test against 0,
which works in all cases, but it feels wrong in my code where I also need
the index of the *first* separator.

Philippe


On Fri, Jan 6, 2023 at 7:12 PM Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 6, 2023 at 9:24 AM Peter Stephenson
> <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On 06/01/2023 16:01 Philippe Altherr <philippe.altherr@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > s=; echo $s[(i)z];
> > >
> > > > 0
> > >
> > > Why is the last line 0 and not 1?
> >
> > Certainly looks plain wrong.
> > None of the existing tests fail with this change.
>
> I thought there was a discussion about this at some point in the past
> ... but it may have been limited to array cases.  I have the feeling
> we concluded that (i) and (I) should produce the same result on empty
> string for purposes of boolean tests, but I can't find such a
> conversation in the archives.  I remain a little concerned that some
> scripts are going to unexpectedly break, but can't point to anything,
> and $anUnsetName[(i)z] returns nothing rather than 0, so it's probably
> an unfounded worry.
>

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