Associative arrays in Shell scripts

Question

We required a script that simulates Associative arrays or Map like data structure for Shell Scripting, any body?

Answer 1

I modified Vadim's solution with the following:

####################################################################
# Bash v3 does not support associative arrays
# and we cannot use ksh since all generic scripts are on bash
# Usage: map_put map_name key value
#
function map_put
{
    alias "${1}$2"="$3"
}

# map_get map_name key
# @return value
#
function map_get {
    if type -p "${1}$2"
        then
            alias "${1}$2" | awk -F "'" '{ print $2; }';
    fi
}

# map_keys map_name 
# @return map keys
#
function map_keys
{
    alias -p | grep $1 | cut -d'=' -f1 | awk -F"$1" '{print $2; }'
}

The change is to map_get in order to prevent it from returning errors if you request a key that doesn't exist, though the side-effect is that it will also silently ignore missing maps, but it suited my use-case better since I just wanted to check for a key in order to skip items in a loop.

Answer 2

To add to Irfan's answer, here is a shorter and faster version of get() since it requires no iteration over the map contents:

get() {
    mapName=$1; key=$2

    map=${!mapName}
    value="$(echo $map |sed -e "s/.*--${key}=\([^ ]*\).*/\1/" -e 's/:SP:/ /g' )"
}

Answer 3

Now answering this question.

Following scripts simulates associative arrays in shell scripts. Its simple and very easy to understand.

Map is nothing but a never ending string that has keyValuePair saved as --name=Irfan --designation=SSE --company=My:SP:Own:SP:Company

spaces are replaced with ':SP:' for values

put() {
    if [ "$#" != 3 ]; then exit 1; fi
    mapName=$1; key=$2; value=`echo $3 | sed -e "s/ /:SP:/g"`
    eval map="\"\$$mapName\""
    map="`echo "$map" | sed -e "s/--$key=[^ ]*//g"` --$key=$value"
    eval $mapName="\"$map\""
}

get() {
    mapName=$1; key=$2; valueFound="false"

    eval map=\$$mapName

    for keyValuePair in ${map};
    do
        case "$keyValuePair" in
            --$key=*) value=`echo "$keyValuePair" | sed -e 's/^[^=]*=//'`
                      valueFound="true"
        esac
        if [ "$valueFound" == "true" ]; then break; fi
    done
    value=`echo $value | sed -e "s/:SP:/ /g"`
}

put "newMap" "name" "Irfan Zulfiqar"
put "newMap" "designation" "SSE"
put "newMap" "company" "My Own Company"

get "newMap" "company"
echo $value

get "newMap" "name"
echo $value

edit: Just added another method to fetch all keys.

getKeySet() {
    if [ "$#" != 1 ]; 
    then 
        exit 1; 
    fi

    mapName=$1; 

    eval map="\"\$$mapName\""

    keySet=`
           echo $map | 
           sed -e "s/=[^ ]*//g" -e "s/\([ ]*\)--/\1/g"
          `
}

Answer 4

Adding another option, if jq is available:

export NAMES="{
  \"Mary\":\"100\",
  \"John\":\"200\",
  \"Mary\":\"50\",
  \"John\":\"300\",
  \"Paul\":\"100\",
  \"Paul\":\"400\",
  \"David\":\"100\"
}"
export NAME=David
echo $NAMES | jq --arg v "$NAME" '.[$v]' | tr -d '"' 

Answer 5

I've found it true, as already mentioned, that the best performing method is to write out key/vals to a file, and then use grep/awk to retrieve them. It sounds like all sorts of unnecessary IO, but disk cache kicks in and makes it extremely efficient -- much faster than trying to store them in memory using one of the above methods (as the benchmarks show).

Here's a quick, clean method I like:

hinit() {
    rm -f /tmp/hashmap.$1
}

hput() {
    echo "$2 $3" >> /tmp/hashmap.$1
}

hget() {
    grep "^$2 " /tmp/hashmap.$1 | awk '{ print $2 };'
}

hinit capitols
hput capitols France Paris
hput capitols Netherlands Amsterdam
hput capitols Spain Madrid

echo `hget capitols France` and `hget capitols Netherlands` and `hget capitols Spain`

If you wanted to enforce single-value per key, you could also do a little grep/sed action in hput().

Answer 6

hput () {
  eval hash"$1"='$2'
}

hget () {
  eval echo '${hash'"$1"'#hash}'
}
hput France Paris
hput Netherlands Amsterdam
hput Spain Madrid
echo `hget France` and `hget Netherlands` and `hget Spain`

---

$ sh hash.sh
Paris and Amsterdam and Madrid