Manipulating an array (printed by php-cli) in shell script

Question

I am a newbie with shell scripts and I learnt a lot today. This is an extension to this question Assigning values printed by PHP CLI to shell variables

I got the solutio

Answer 1

You should debug your PHP script first to produce the valid array content, code

print $associativeArray;

will just get you the following output:

$ php test.php 
Array

You can simply print the associative array in a foreach loop:

foreach ( $associativeArray as $key=>$val ){
    echo "$key:$val\n";
}

giving a list of variable names + content separated by ':'

$ php test.php 
BASE_PATH:1
db_host:2
db_name:3
db_user:4
db_pass:5

---

As for the shell script, I suggest using simple and understandable shell constructs and then get to the advanced ones (like ${#result}) to use them correctly.

I have tried the following bash script to get the variables from PHP script output to shell script:

# set the field separator for read comand
IFS=":"

# parse php script output by read command
php $PWD'/test.php' | while read -r key val; do
    echo "$key = $val"
done

Answer 2

With bash4, you can use mapfile to populate an array and process substitution to feed it:

mapfile -t array < <( your_command )

Then you can go through the array with:

for line in "${array[@]}"

Or use indices:

for i in "${#array[@]}"
do
   : use "${array[i]}"
done

Answer 3

You don't say what shell you're using, but assuming it's one that supports arrays:

result=($(getConfigVals))    # you need to create an array before you can ...

for((cnt=0;cnt<${#result};cnt++))
do
    echo ${result[$cnt]}" - "$cnt    # ... access it using a subscript
done

This is going to be an indexed array, rather than an associative array. While associative arrays are supported in Bash 4, you'll need to use a loop similar to the one in Martin Kosek's answer for assignment if you want to use them.