Re: reading a file into an array. mapfile? (f)?

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>]

"Rocky Bernstein" wrote:
> Further tests show that the behavior seems to be to drop blank lines but put
> one at the end of the file.

Apologies, you're right; it seems you *do* need the @ flag, but my test
was too simple to show it.

array=("${(f@)mapfile[foo.txt]}")

I'm not entirely sure why that is but I must be misremembering the (f)
rules.

Also, it seems you always get an extra blank at the end: I think that's
because mapfile returns the complete file including the "\n" and the (f)
flag splits on that "\n" giving you a blank after it.  This should be
entirely predictable, however (I hope): you get that last blank line if
there was a final newline, and if you don't get it there wasn't a final
newline.

I think that's the one difference from "${(f@)$(<foo.txt)}": in that
case a final newline is always stripped, but consequently you can't tell
if there was one there.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
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