How to pass an associative array as argument to a function in Bash?

Question

How do you pass an associative array as an argument to a function? Is this possible in Bash?

The code below is not working as expected:

function iter         


        

Answer 1

From the best Bash guide ever:

declare -A fullNames
fullNames=( ["lhunath"]="Maarten Billemont" ["greycat"]="Greg Wooledge" )
for user in "${!fullNames[@]}"
do
    echo "User: $user, full name: ${fullNames[$user]}."
done

I think the issue in your case is that $@ is not an associative array: "@: Expands to all the words of all the positional parameters. If double quoted, it expands to a list of all the positional parameters as individual words."

Answer 2

Update, to fully answer the question, here is an small section from my library:

Iterating an associative array by reference

shopt -s expand_aliases
alias array.getbyref='e="$( declare -p ${1} )"; eval "declare -A E=${e#*=}"'
alias array.foreach='array.keys ${1}; for key in "${KEYS[@]}"'

function array.print {
    array.getbyref
    array.foreach
    do
        echo "$key: ${E[$key]}"
    done
}

function array.keys {
    array.getbyref
    KEYS=(${!E[@]})
}   

# Example usage:
declare -A A=([one]=1 [two]=2 [three]=3)
array.print A

This we a devlopment of my earlier work, which I will leave below.

@ffeldhaus - nice response, I took it and ran with it:

t() 
{
    e="$( declare -p $1 )"
    eval "declare -A E=${e#*=}"
    declare -p E
}

declare -A A='([a]="1" [b]="2" [c]="3" )'
echo -n original declaration:; declare -p A
echo -n running function tst: 
t A

# Output:
# original declaration:declare -A A='([a]="1" [b]="2" [c]="3" )'
# running function tst:declare -A E='([a]="1" [b]="2" [c]="3" )'