hugot / bash-array-utils Goto Github PK

I see that you use this check in hasValue

  if ! Array::isValid "$1"; then
    echo "$(caller): $1 is not a valid array."
    exit 1
  fi

I think it would be better to return instead of exit.

My use-case is the following:

# source array functions

if Array::hasValue my_array my_value; then
  : # do something
else
  : # do something else
fi

: # do other things

...in this case the script would simply exit, not executing the else clause or the rest of the code. I think the choice of exiting should be left to the user (with set -e or other ways).

Another way would be to offer two modes: a strict mode where the array is required to be set, and a non-strict mode where is does not matter.

By the way, you use Array::isValid "$1" || return $? in all other places, so maybe it was not intended to use exit?

Hello!

Would you be interested in offering a function that can return the index of a given element?

I was thinking something like Array::indexOf, taking an array as $1 and the element as $2, returning the index between 0 and n, or -1 if not found.

About the way to return it, we could either write to stdout, but it does not feel very efficient because we would then have to use a subprocess like index=$(Array::indexOf array elem). So maybe we would instead allow for a third parameter as the name of the variable to set with the result: Array::indexOf array elem index.

I can open a PR if you're interested! 🙂

I believe people usually go with the (not so good) name of "array" in shell scripts (maybe I'm wrong), so why not reserve the name "_array" instead? Same for "_variable" instead of "variable", though this one seems less important.

$ [[ 09 == +([0-9]) ]] && echo true
true  # will trigger numeric comparison with -eq, but:
$ [[ 09 -eq 09 ]] && echo true
bash: 09: value too great for base (error token is "09")

There might be other cases where the string is composed only of numbers, but the user actually want to compare it as a string.

A solution to keep this feature would be to check if the array was declared with the -i option:

$ declare -ia int_array
$ declare -p int_array
declare -ai int_array
$ if declare -p int_array | grep -q '^declare -ai'; then echo true; fi
true