Associative arrays in Shell scripts

Solution 1:

Another option, if portability is not your main concern, is to use associative arrays that are built in to the shell. This should work in bash 4.0 (available now on most major distros, though not on OS X unless you install it yourself), ksh, and zsh:

declare -A newmap
newmap[name]="Irfan Zulfiqar"
newmap[designation]=SSE
newmap[company]="My Own Company"

echo ${newmap[company]}
echo ${newmap[name]}

Depending on the shell, you may need to do a typeset -A newmap instead of declare -A newmap, or in some it may not be necessary at all.

Solution 2:

Another non-bash 4 way.

#!/bin/bash

# A pretend Python dictionary with bash 3 
ARRAY=( "cow:moo"
        "dinosaur:roar"
        "bird:chirp"
        "bash:rock" )

for animal in "${ARRAY[@]}" ; do
    KEY=${animal%%:*}
    VALUE=${animal#*:}
    printf "%s likes to %s.\n" "$KEY" "$VALUE"
done

echo -e "${ARRAY[1]%%:*} is an extinct animal which likes to ${ARRAY[1]#*:}\n"

You could throw an if statement for searching in there as well. if [[ $var =~ /blah/ ]]. or whatever.