CODEWITHSUNDEEP
awk
karakfa
karakfa

Reputation: 67507

array length fails in awk function body

I don't have access to other awk versions to check the generality of this issue.

$ awk --version
GNU Awk 3.1.5

consider this simple test

$ awk 'function f(x) {x[1]} BEGIN{f(x); print length(x)}'
1

works as expected, however printing the length in the function body fails

$ awk 'function f(x) {x[1]; print length(x)} BEGIN{f(x)}'
awk: fatal: attempt to use array `x (from x)' in a scalar context

the only way to get the length of an array in a function body seems to be counting the elements for(i in x) c++

this is inspired by this answer

Upvotes: 2

Views: 610

Answers (1)

Ed Morton
Ed Morton

Reputation: 203995

Once upon a time length() was for finding the number of characters in a string. Then gawk modified it to also find the number of elements in an array. Then POSIX adopted the gawk approach and here we are today with all awks cheerfully taking strings or arrays as arguments to length().

What you're experiencing doesn't happen in modern awk versions, it was a bug in gawk 3.1.5 and 3.1.6, see https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2008-03/msg00028.html

Upvotes: 4

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