Ah, but Mark, I figured all that out by the bottom of the post. At that point I was still laboring under 'visual thinking' . I dare say I'm straightened out. I had thought that 'split on newlines' meant 'add \n's where needed to demarcate element boundaries'. It's actually sorta the opposite -- there is no demarcation character and \n's will in fact be removed. But I'm still not happy with the dollars. I had thought that " $'...' " was grammatical but we have " ' ' " -- meaning an empty line -- without the leading dollar, so the closest thing I could pattern was that they replaced the newlines. If anyone on the planet can get it wrong, it's me.Small followup I meant to type but didn't:
On Sat, Apr 13, 2024 at 1:19 PM Mark J. Reed <markjreed@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
redline '\nddd=( "${(@f)aaa}" ) ... it seems like a lot of trouble to copy the array as it is.'
That comment confuses me; you aren't copying the array as it is at all! You've gone from aaa, which has one element, to ddd having 8 elements. That's a far cry from "copying as it is".