Last Updated on February 10, 2022 EST by Jordan
As I dive into ZSH more and more and start to put more hours into zshbop, I’m finding it harder to locate good ZSH documentation. I got stuck with an associative array being unsorted, why? I started to document all of the scripts and commands I’ve created and used the following format.
help_files[gcp]='GIT commit then push!'
This makes it super easy to explain all of the scripts and functions I have without having to place them all in one help file. I just use the associative array just above the function I’m writing.
The problem is that they’re unordered as I create them as needed. This results in the help file spewing the following out.
------------------------ -- Help Command Categories -- ------------------------ help php - PHP related commands help wordpress - WordPress related commands help ssh - SSH related commands help nginx - Nginx related commands help software - Software related commands help software_description - -- To install, run software <cmd> help ubuntu - Ubuntu OS related commands help mail - All mail related commands help git - Git related commands help mysql - MySQL related commands help linux - Linux related commands help core - Core commands
It’s super ugly. So I started to look at trying to sort the associate array somehow. I first thought I could actually sort the array data, take out the data and then put it back in. But I thought that was too much work, and I wouldn’t understand the code as it was a copy and paste snippet I found on Stack Overflow.
I started to use ZSH substitution modifiers, which I had already been using for creating my command categories and other help verbiage. Here’s an example of listing all of the category commands.
help_files[nginx]='Nginx related commands'
help_files[php]='PHP related commands'
help_files[mail]='All mail related commands'
help_files[ubuntu]='Ubuntu OS related commands'
for key value in ${(kv)help_files}; do
printf '%s\n' " help ${(r:25:)key} - $value"
done
This works out well and the output is what you see in the previous code snippet. It’s just not sorted.
So I tried to work with ZSH substitutions but I couldn’t figure out how to return a key and values while also sorting. I couldn’t use (okv) this broke and I don’t know why. Still learning….
So instead I just grabbed the key, and sorted it. Then passed the kay to the array to print out the value. So easy.
for key in ${(kon)help_zshbop}; do
printf '%s\n' " zshbop ${(r:25:)key} - help_zshbop[$key]"
done