Re: counting trouble

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/04/18 06:15 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 11:21 AM, Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > That can't be all there is to it.  $#array only becomes a count of
> > characters if the context forces the array into string form.  Which
> > admittedly can happen in some non-obvious ways, but what you've shown
> > above is not one of those ways.  What are you really doing?
I'll take another look, that's a good clue anyway.
> > Hacking away I find this works:
> >
> >      [ -e "$1" ] && tmp=( "${(f)${1}}" ) || tmp=( ${1}*(N) )
> Umm ...  [ -e "$1" ] will only succeed for a single literal file name,
Exactly the point of it.   I found I had to handle an exact match 
specially.  I'm sure there's a better way.
> expected this to work: " ${(f)${1}*} " but it doesn't.
> Expected it to do what?  Filename generation like ${1}* out in the
> open (so to speak)?
Yeah, but as I said, I've figured out that that won't happen, it's not a 
glob 'inside'.  So how would I get the results of the glob 'inside' as 
well as the single match not counting characters? .... but you've just 
said that shouldn't be happening, so I'll follow that clue.

> What led you to expect that?  In any case
> filename generation would never produce a newline-separated string
> (again barring files with newlines in the name), so (f) would not do
> anything to the result.
>
> Please don't think about globbing as returning "lines".  It doesn't.
But:

   tmp=( ${1}*(N) )

... seems to give me exactly that -- an array split on lines with no 
worries about spaces in filenames.  And '$#' counts the number of files 
just as I want.

  print -l "${tmp[@]}\n"

... does exactly what I'm expecting (bottom example):

15 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 3 $ . try; find_match try,12
Exact match found: "try,12"

15 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 3 $ . try; find_match try,1
Unique match found: "try,1"

15 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 3 $ . try; find_match try,14
Exact match found: "try,14,interim"

15 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 3 $ . try; find_match try,*

ERROR: No wildcards please

15 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 3 $ . try; find_match try,

ERROR: 18:: 15 matches for "try,", please disambiguate or copy manually:
try,1
try,10,working
try,11,very nice, help text
try,12
try,13
try,14,interim
try,15,important noglob and messages
try,2,exact match handled
try,3,now add declare
try,4,no ls
try,5,shakeout bugs
try,6,interim safe
try,7,now with find_match
try,8
try,9,working
===========================================

What would be manna from heaven is to be able to look at an array and 
'see' the construction of it -- how it's split, if one could see the 
newlines and/or spaces in both input and output that would be huge.  
Even after several years I still find myself throwing syntax at things 
hopefully but almost randomly until eventually something works.  If I 
could see the hidden structure of both input and output there'd be a lot 
less guessing.