Re: [bug-gawk] Is there a way to access associative array from the environment?

[arnold]

Hi.

Stephane's answer is correct. This isn't doable.

Thanks,

Arnold

> To: address@hidden
> From: Stephane Chazelas <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2016 06:33:02 +0000
> Subject: Re: [bug-gawk] Is there a way to access associative array from the
>       environment?
>
> 2016-03-09 22:31:45 -0600, Peng Yu:
> > Hi, The following command will not access "a" in $MYARRAY. Is there a
> > way to do so in awk?
> > 
> > declare -A MYARRAY
> > MYARRAY=([a]=x [b]=y)
> > awk -e 'BEGIN { print ENVIRON["MYARRAY"]["a"] }'
> [...]
>
> The environment is just a list of strings conventionaly in the
> format "var=value" passed to executed commands, like the list of
> arguments.
>
> associative arrays are a data type of some shells (ksh93, zsh
> and recent versions of bash). They are different in all 3 shells
> though a few things in common.
>
> Though you could imagine associative arrays of one or more of
> those shells could be encoded one way or another so that they be
> put in an environment string, it's not currently done, and even
> if it was, applications like awk would have to be modified to be
> able to understand and decode those variables.
>
> Shells like rc do allow exporting array variables with some
> encoding, but those exported variables are only understood by
> other rc instances, not awk or anything else:
>
> $ rc -c "zzz=(foo bar); awk 'BEGIN{print ENVIRON[\"zzz\"]}'" | sed -n l
> foo\001bar$
>
> All awk sees is the encoded version (here using byte 1 as
> separator and byte 2 as an escape character).
>
> -- 
> Stephane