Work with bash/ksh associative arrays

Today, I’m going to give you some examples on how to work with associative arrays in bash / ksh.

This is not a complicated subject, but you have to be careful when writing your code because you will have extra brackets, braces, …

Support

Bash

You need version 4 or higher of bash to work with associative arrays.

You can check you version this way:

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.2.46(2)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

KSH

You need “ksh93” to work with associative arrays.

Unfortunately, the is no “perfect” solution to get your version of KSH because of the various existing versions (pdksh, mksh,…) and the commands they support.

Personally, I use these 2 commands:

$ ksh --version
  version         sh (AT&T Research) 93u+ 2012-08-01

or

$ ksh --version
  strings /bin/ksh | grep Version
@(#)$Id: Version AJM 93u+ 2012-08-01 $

 

Examples

The syntax is not the same on bash and ksh. I will mention the shell used before each example.

Declare an associative array

Empty array

Bash:

declare -A MYARRAY

Ksh:

typeset -A MYARRAY

Array with values

Bash:

declare -A MYARRAY=(["key1"]=data1 ['key2']=data2 ['key3']=data3)

Ksh:

typeset -A MYARRAY=(["key1"]=data1 ['key2']=data2 ['key3']=data3)

As you can see, keys can be specified with single quotes, double quotes, or without quote. The only difference is that when you use a single quotation mark, you can not use a variable as a key because it will not be interpreted by the shell (as usual).

Your key can contain spaces but it will be harder to work with afterwards.

Remember: the keys are not necessarily sorted in memory as they were declared!

Add value to an associative array

One value

Bash & ksh:

MYARRAY[key4]=data4

Using variables:

KEY=field4
VALUE=data4
MYARRAY[$KEY]=$VALUE

Many values

Bash & ksh:

MYARRAY+=([key10]=data10 [key11]=data11)

Get a value out of an associative array

Bash & ksh:

echo ${MYARRAY[key4]}

Using variables:

KEY=field4
echo ${MYARRAY[$KEY]}

As for the population of the array, keys can be specified with single quotes, double quotes, or without quote.

Print the entire array content

Bash & ksh:

echo ${MYARRAY[@]}

Print all keys

Bash & ksh:

echo "${!MYARRAY[@]}"

Loop through an associative array

Now, you know how to print all keys and all values so looping through the array will be easy!

Loop through all key/value pair

Bash & ksh:

for key in "${!MYARRAY[@]}";do 
echo "Key : $key - Value : ${MYARRAY[$key]}"; 
done

Loop through all values

Bash & ksh:

for value in "${MYARRAY[@]}";do 
echo $value; 
done

Loop through all keys

Bash & ksh:

for key in "${!MYARRAY[@]}";do 
echo $key; 
done

Clear an associative array

Be careful, you need to unset and declare the array again! Otherwise, the old associative array will not be replaced by an empty one.

Bash:

$ echo ${MYARRAY[@]}
data1 data2 data3

$ declare -A MYARRAY

$ echo ${MYARRAY[@]}
data1 data2 data3

$ unset MYARRAY

$ echo ${MYARRAY[@]}
$

Ksh:

$ echo ${MYARRAY[@]}
data1 data2 data3

$ typeset -A MYARRAY

$ echo ${MYARRAY[@]}
data1 data2 data3

$ unset MYARRAY

$ echo ${MYARRAY[@]}
$

Delete key

The use of double quotation marks is considered a best practice (even if it works without them):if your key contains space and you did not put double quotation marks, you will get an error.

Bash & ksh:

$ unset MYARRAY["key3"]

Get the length of an associative array

Bash & ksh:

echo ${#MYARRAY[@]}

Test if a key exist

Bash & ksh:

if [[ -v "MYARRAY[key5]" ]] ; then
	# code if key exist
else
	# code if key does not exist
fi

Test if the value for a key is an empty string

Bash & ksh:

if [[ -z "${MYARRAY[key4]}" ]]; then
	# code if empty
else
	# code if not empty
fi

If the key does not exist, it will be considered as empty!

I hope these tips have been useful. Stay tuned for more DBA stuff!

One thought on “Work with bash/ksh associative arrays

  1. Hi, maybe you could add one more thing: in ksh (using ksh 2020.0.0 in Ubuntu 20.04) at least, the value in an associative array can also be an array. But it seems ${MYARRAY[@]} doesn’t contain full values if they’re arrays, only the first element of the value array is printed. In this case the values need to be iterated over with keys it seems.

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