Creating array of objects in bash

Question

Is it possible to create an array of objects in bash?

That\'s how I\'m trying:

declare -a identifications=(
  {
    email    = \'...\',
    password          


        

Answer 1

You could do some trickery with associative arrays (introduced in Bash 4.0) and namerefs (see manual for declare and the first paragraph of Shell Parameters – introduced in Bash 4.3):

#!/bin/bash

declare -A identification0=(
    [email]='test@abc.com'
    [password]='admin123'
)
declare -A identification1=(
    [email]='test@xyz.org'
    [password]='passwd1!'
)

declare -n identification
for identification in ${!identification@}; do
    echo "Email: ${identification[email]}"
    echo "Password: ${identification[password]}"
done

This prints

Email: test@abc.com
Password: admin123
Email: test@xyz.org
Password: passwd1!

declare -A declares an associative array.

The trick is to assign all your "objects" (associative arrays) variable names starting with the same prefix, like identification. The ${!prefix@} notation expands to all variable names starting with prefix:

$ var1=
$ var2=
$ var3=
$ echo ${!var@}
var1 var2 var3

Then, to access the key-value pairs of the associative array, we declare the control variable for the for loop with the nameref attribute:

declare -n identification

so that the loop

for identification in ${!identification@}; do

makes identification behave as if it were the actual variable from the expansion of ${!identification@}.

In all likelihood, it'll be easier to do something like the following, though:

emails=('test@abc.com' 'test@xyz.org')
passwords=('admin123' 'passwd1!')
for (( i = 0; i < ${#emails[@]}; ++i )); do
    echo "Email: ${emails[i]}"
    echo "Password: ${passwords[i]}"
done

I.e., just loop over two arrays containing your information.