Re: triviality regarding $# counts

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2024-04-12 12:09, Bart Schaefer wrote:

> None of that is about $#.  $# just counts either characters in a
> string or elements in an array, full stop.
>     
    Right, it's a question of getting the splitting correct.  
> What you're asking for is a dissertation on how to split text into
> arrays.  I have no idea what you mean by "without spaces" and there's
> no inherent definition of a "paragraph"
>     
    I know it, thus the air-quotes, In one of my tests I had three
    consecutive outputs from aptitude written to the array and at some
    point the count was 3, so somehow each separate output got merged
    into one element.  
> so the best you could get from
> this is characters, words, and lines -- but even for words you need to
> explain whether you mean "shell words" (separated by $IFS characters)
> or something else, including whether quotes matter.
>     
    It is a bit confusing.  
    
>   Further, you seem
> to be starting from scalar text sometimes, and text that's already
> split into an array other times -- in the latter case you have to
> explain whether and how you want the array re-joined into a block of
> text before re-splitting.
>     
    I've got a whole bunch of that figured out today.  What I thought
    were arrays were scalars that just happened to print nicely on
    separate lines where wanted but not due to '\n''s.  And what I
    thought line splitting -- (f) -- did was enter '\n's into the body
    of the variable -- a guy might be forgiven for thinking that -- but
    no it's dollar signs.  And efforts to force '\n's' were disastrous. 
    Some quality time with typedef -p really helped.  Sorta funny,
    everything was working fine, but there were hidden disasters lurking
    that surfaced for that most trivial of reasons -- but forced me to
    redo quite a bit of stuff where things really are arrays and
    nevermind the '\n's.  And I get my line counts honestly now :-)  One
    thing: it sure is hard to hang on to blank lines.  I wish there was
    some option to default to preserving them.
> The shell is not a word processor and doesn't understand your
> conceptualization of text formatting.
>     
    Very true.  But I focus on what I can see and if it looks right it's
    easy to think it is right.  Anyway, thanks to Lawrence much as been
    learned. BTW $# is a very convenient way of detecting how things are
    split, now that I know that scalars always return character counts
    and arrays, element counts.  Easy!