Re: Funny behaviour of associative arrays

[Greg Wooledge]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2023 at 06:24:30AM -0500, Dennis Williamson wrote:
> Your first assignment is a way to assign a list of members to an
> associative array. Your second assignment creates a single element with the
> index "[a]=b [c]=d" which has a null value.

I'm seeing some parser voodoo here.

unicorn:~$ string='[a]=b [c]=d'
unicorn:~$ a=( $string )
unicorn:~$ declare -p a
declare -A a=(["[a]=b [c]=d"]="" )

But...

unicorn:~$ s1='[a]=b' s2='[c]=d'
unicorn:~$ a=( $s1 $s2 )
unicorn:~$ declare -p a
declare -A a=(["[a]=b"]="[c]=d" )

So, no word splitting is performed on $string?  That's surprising.  Let's
see if there's globbing.

unicorn:~$ string='*.txt'
unicorn:~$ a=( $string )
unicorn:~$ declare -p a
declare -A a=(["*.txt"]="" )

Again, a surprise (although not as big a surprise if we already knew there
is no word splitting).  This is entirely different from the behavior we
see when assigning to an *indexed* array:

unicorn:~$ i=( $string )
unicorn:~$ echo "${#i[@]}"
47

I'm not saying this is wrong... just surprising.  Was it an intentional
decision?