In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, you wrote: >I think select and paths should come close to what you're asking: >>> select [ a "this is a" b "this is b" ] 'a >== "this is a" I'll have to ponder that for a while but my first thought is that doing it that way would make it difficult to populate it from a data file of arbitrary data. Here is a snipit from the Awk doc's that explains what I'm after. -------------------------------------------------------- http://www.gnu.org/manual/gawk-3.0.3/html_chapter/gawk_12.html Arrays in awk superficially resemble arrays in other programming languages; but there are fundamental differences. In awk, you don't need to specify the size of an array before you start to use it. Additionally, any number or string in awk may be used as an array index, not just consecutive integers. In most other languages, you have to declare an array and specify how many elements or components it contains. In such languages, the declaration causes a contiguous block of memory to be allocated for that many elements. An index in the array usually must be a positive integer; for example, the index zero specifies the first element in the array, which is actually stored at the beginning of the block of memory. Index one specifies the second element, which is stored in memory right after the first element, and so on. It is impossible to add more elements to the array, because it has room for only as many elements as you declared. (Some languages allow arbitrary starting and ending indices, e.g., `15 .. 27', but the size of the array is still fixed when the array is declared.) A contiguous array of four elements might look like this, conceptually, if the element values are eight, "foo", "" and 30: Only the values are stored; the indices are implicit from the order of the values. Eight is the value at index zero, because eight appears in the position with zero elements before it. Arrays in awk are different: they are associative. This means that each array is a collection of pairs: an index, and its corresponding array element value: Element 4 Value 30 Element 2 Value "foo" Element 1 Value 8 Element 3 Value "" We have shown the pairs in jumbled order because their order is irrelevant. One advantage of associative arrays is that new pairs can be added at any time. For example, suppose we add to the above array a tenth element whose value is "number ten". The result is this...
