Re: zsh style associative array assignment bug

[Eric Cook]

On 3/30/21 10:54 AM, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 3/29/21 6:40 PM, Eric Cook wrote:

>> Its just when populating that array dynamically with another array
>> if that second array didn't contain `v1' hypothetically, the array gets 
>> shifted to
>
> OK, how would you do that? What construct would you use in this scenario?
>
Sample input:
$ exiftool -j *.flac | jq -r '.[]| {Artist, Track, Genre, Title}|to_entries[]| 
.key + "|" + .value'
Artist|AK420
Track|
Genre|lofi
Title|A2 - Northern Lights

--
typeset -A tags=(); set --
while IFS='|' read -ra ary; do
  set -- "$@" "${ary[@]}"
done < <(
  exiftool -j *.flac |
  jq -r '.[]| {Artist, Track, Genre, Title}|to_entries[]| .key + "|" + .value'
)
eval 'tags=('"${*@Q}"\)
typeset -p tags
declare -A tags=([lofi]="Title" [Track]="Genre" [Artist]="AK420" ["A2 - 
Northern Lights"]="" )

>> a=( [k1]=k2 [v2]=k3 [v3]= )
>> which i would imagine to be unexpected for the author of the code and would 
>> rather
>> it error out instead of chugging along.
>
> Wouldn't this be a programming error? If this were a concern, since any
> array can have elements with empty values, I would recommend a different
> strategy to copy it.
>

Yeah, it is a programming error that could've used better validation.
I just find it weird that the assumption of an assignment with an odd number of 
elements with
this new syntax is that the odd number element is always a key missing a value 
that is filled in.
when any of the keys or values could've been missing during the assignment.