Bash Associative Arrays

The bash man page has long had the following bug listed: "It's too big and too slow" (at the very bottom of the man page). If you agree with that, then you probably won't want to read about the "new" associative arrays that were added in version 4.0 of bash. On the other hand, if you've ever used any modern Office Suite and seen code-bloat at its finest and just think the bash folks are exaggerating a bit, then read on.

There's nothing too surprising about associative arrays in bash, they are as you probably expect:

declare -A aa
aa[hello]=world
aa[ab]=cd

The -A option declares aa to be an associative array. Assignments are then made by putting the "key" inside the square brackets rather than an array index. You can also assign multiple items at once:

declare -A aa
aa=([hello]=world [ab]=cd)

Retrieving values is also as expected:

if [[ ${aa[hello]} == world ]]; then
    echo equal
fi
bb=${aa[hello]}

You can also use keys that contain spaces or other "strange" characters:

aa["hello world"]="from bash"

Note however that there appears to be a bug when assigning more than one item to an array with a parenthesis enclosed list if any of the keys have spaces in them. For example, consider the following script:

declare -A b
b=([hello]=world ["a b"]="c d")

for i in 1 2
do
    if [[ ${b["a b"]} == "c d" ]]; then
        echo $i: equals c d
    else
        echo $i: does not equal c d
    fi
    b["a b"]="c d"
done

At the top, b["a b"] is assigned a value as part of a parenthesis enclosed list of items. Inside the loop the if statement tests to see if the item is what we expect it to be. At the bottom of the loop the same value is assigned to the same key but using a "direct" assignment. Then the loop executes one more time. One would expect that the if test would succeed both times, however it does not:

$ bash ba.sh
1: does not equal c d
2: equals c d

You can see the problem if you add the following to the end of the script to print out all the keys:

for k in "${!b[@]}"
do
    echo "$k"
done

The result you get is:

$ bash ba.sh
1: does not equal c d
2: equals c d
a\ b
a b
hello

You can see here that the first assignment, the one done via the list incorrectly adds the key as a\ b rather than simply as a b.

Before ending I want to point out another feature that I just recently discovered about bash arrays: the ability to extend them with the += operator. This is actually the thing that lead me to the man page which then allowed me to discover the associative array feature. This is not a new feature, just new to me:

aa=(hello world)
aa+=(b c d)

After the += assignment the array will now contain 5 items, the values after the += having been appended to the end of the array. This also works with associative arrays.

aa=([hello]=world)
aa+=([b]=c)           # aa now contains 2 items

Note also that the += operator also works with regular variables and appends to the end of the current value.

aa="hello"
aa+=" world"          # aa is now "hello world"

For more on using bash arrays look at the man page or check out my earlier post.