On Sun, Mar 01, 2015 at 12:05:53AM -0600, [email protected] wrote:
> A string is either legal or not legal as a key for an associative array.
> However, bash accepts certain keys in some contexts but not in other
> contexts,
It's all about the quoting.
> #!/bin/bash
>
> declare -A foo
>
> foo[a]="one"
> foo["a'b"]="two"
>
> echo "${foo[@]}"
That's all correct so far. (Note, however, "declare -p foo" is much
better for showing you the contents of a variable, especially an array.)
> echo ${foo[a]}
> echo ${foo["a'b"]}
Missing quotes. VERY bad.
imadev:~$ echo "${foo[a]}"
one
imadev:~$ echo "${foo["a'b"]}"
two
> unset foo[a]
> unset foo["a'b"]
Again, missing quotes. If you have a file named "fooa" in the current
working directory, the first one expands to "unset fooa". You don't want
that.
imadev:~$ unset "foo[a]"
Now, the second one is MUCH harder. Your best bet is to store the
index in a variable instead of trying to deal with multiple levels
of quoting in the same argument.
imadev:~$ i="a'b"
imadev:~$ unset 'foo[$i]'
imadev:~$ declare -p foo
declare -A foo='()'
