How To Fake Associative Arrays In Bash

Greetings,

As promised in our previous post on working with associative arrays in Linux and Unix, we're back to tackle the subject of associative arrays in bash. As was noted, we're using bash version 2.05b.0(1) and (to my knowledge) bash ( up to, and including, bash 3.2 ) does not directly support associative arrays yet. You can, of course, create one-dimensional (or simple index) arrays, but hashing key/value pairs is still not quite there.

Today we'll check out how to emulate that same functionality in bash that can be found in Perl and Awk. First we'll initialize our array, even though we don't necessarily have to:

host # typeset -a MySimpleHash

To begin with, we'll have to consider what bash already does for us and how we want that to change. For our first example, let's take a look at what happens if we just make assignments to a bash array with, first, a numeric and then an alpha value:

host # MySimpleHash["bob"]=15
host # echo ${MySimpleHash["bob"]}
15
host # MySimpleHash["joe"]="jeff"
host # echo ${MySimpleHash["joe"]}
jeff

This seems to be working out okay, but if we look at the values again, it seems that MySimpleHash["bob"] gets reassigned after we assign the alpha value "jeff"to the key "joe" :

host # echo ${MySimpleHash["bob"]}
jeff

This behaviour repeats itself no matter if we mix integers with strings. Bash can't handle this natively (but, it never claimed it could :)

host # MySimpleHash["bob"]="john"
host # echo ${MySimpleHash["bob"]}
john
host # MySimpleHash["joe"]="jeff"
host # echo ${MySimpleHash["joe"]}
jeff
host # echo ${MySimpleHash["bob"]}
jeff

This looks as though it's going to necesitate an "eval" nightmare much much worse than faking arrays in the Bourne Shell! Ouch! However, we might be able to get around it with a little bit of "laziness" if we just construct two parallel arrays. This, of course, would necessitate keeping the values in both arrays equal and consistent. That is, if "bob" is the third key in our associative array, and "joe" is "bob"'s value, both need to be at the exact same numeric index in each regular array. Otherwise translation becomes not-impossible, but probably a real headache ;)

To demonstrate we'll create a simple "3 key/value pair" associative array using the double-regular-array method, like so:

host # typeset -a MySimpleKeys
host # typeset -a MySimpleVals
host # MySimpleKeys[0]="abc";MySimpleKeys[1]="ghi";MySimpleKeys[2]="mno"
host # MySimpleVals[0]="def";MySimpleVals[1]="jkl";MySimpleVals[2]="pqr"

Now, we should be able to "fake" associative array behaviour by calling the common index from each array (In this fake associative array we have key/value pairs of abc/def, ghi/jkl and mno/pqr). Now that we have the key/value pairs set up, we need to set up the "associative array" so that we can request the values by the key names, rather than the numeric array index. We'll do this in a script later, so our command line doesn't get any uglier:

host # key=$1
host #for (( x=0 ; x < ${#MySimpleKeys[@]}; x++ ))
>do
>    if [ $key == "${MySimpleKeys[$x]}" ]
> then
>     echo "${MySimpleVals[$x]}"
> fi
>done

Testing this on the command line produces suitable, but pretty lame looking results:

host # ./MySimpleHash ghi
jkl

We're going to need to modify the script so that it takes its keys and just returns a value that doesn't need to be cropped (using "echo -n" will solve this nicely):

echo "${MySimpleVals[$x]}"

changes to

echo -n "${MySimpleVals[$x]}" <--- This is helpful if we want to use the result as a return value :)

Still, the shell is going to balk at whatever we do to try and pass an argument to the script like this:

host # ./MySimpleHash{ghi}
-bash: ./MySimpleHash{ghi}: No such file or directory

So, for now, we'll just make it so it's "almost" nice looking:

host # a=`./MySimpleHash {abc}`
host # echo $a
def

It'll get the job done, and could be used in a pinch, but is way too klunky to replace Awk or Perl's built-in associative array handling. Nevertheless, at least we have a way we can get around it if we "have" to :)

I've included the script written during this post below, but, if you want to check out a more complex (and, subsequently, much more elegant) script to fake associative arrays in Perl, you should take a look at this associative array hack for bash and also this bash hack that comes at the issue from a whole different angle.

I think you'll like either one of these scripts a lot better than this one, but hopefully we've both learned, at least a little bit, about the way associative arrays work (and how they differ from one dimensional arrays) in the process :)

Cheers,





This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

#!/bin/bash

# TerribleAAbashHack.sh
# What was I thinking? 
#
# 2008 - Mike Golvach - eggi@comcast.net
#
# Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
#

typeset -a MySimpleKeys
typeset -a MySimpleVals
MySimpleKeys[0]="abc";MySimpleKeys[1]="ghi";MySimpleKeys[2]="mno"
MySimpleVals[0]="def";MySimpleVals[1]="jkl";MySimpleVals[2]="pqr"

key=`echo $@|sed -e 's/{//g' -e 's/}//g'`

for (( x=0 ; x < ${#MySimpleKeys[@]}; x++ ))
do
        if [ $key == "${MySimpleKeys[$x]}" ]
        then
                echo -n "${MySimpleVals[$x]}"
        fi
done

, Mike