Re: ordering of file-patterns completions

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 6,  6:11pm, John wrote:
}
} > doesn't quite generalize if there may be options (words starting with
} > a hyphen) between the command name and the first file.  If that is the
} > case, you'll need to do some pre-processing of $words before calling
} > _arguments to determine which position to reference instead of [2].
} 
} Yeah, unfortunately I do.  I was using _arguments to process those, and 
} then zstyle to deal with the files.  But I'm not quite understanding how 
} to do what you're describing to pre-process them instead of using 
} _arguments.

How complicated this needs to be depends on what might appear in the
words preceding the first file.

If there's nothing but options, for example, then you can probably do:

  local first_file=$(( ${words[(I)-*]} + 1 ))

which says to start from the end of the array and look backward to
find the index of the first word that DOES start with a hyphen, and
then add one to it.  Or, if there might be file names that start with
hyphen, then:

  local first_file=$(( ${${words[2,-1]}[(i)[^-]*]} + 1 ))

which says "in the array formed by the second through last elements of
the words array, report the index of the first element that does not
begin with a hyphen" and then add one to compensate for starting at 2.

If there are options that might take arguments, so some of the words
before the first file might not begin with hyphen, then you'll have to
try something else; perhaps:

  local -a opts
  set -- $words[2,-1]
  zparseopts -a opts ...
  local first_file=$(( $#opts + 2 ))

where "..." is a description of the options.  Yeah, this kinda sucks
because you have to describe the same options to both zparseopts and
_arguments.  In any case, once you're done computing first_file:

  _arguments $stuff_describing_options \
    '1:The first file:_files -g "XXX.*"' \
    '*:All other files:_files -g "*.${words[first_file]:x}"'