pointers to variables ?
- Posted by cjnwl Mar 03, 2023
- 1711 views
Hi,
Another newbie question: are there pointers to variables, or is there any way to simulate them ?
For example, in gawk there are no pointers per se, but you can simulate them using the SYMTAB array:
my_list[1] = "test" var = "my_list" print SYMTAB[var][1]This last line is equivalent to
print my_list[1]
In my gawk app I make extensive use of this ability as I need to manipulate lists whose name I only know at runtime, and I don't know that I'll be able to do this without pointers or something similar that enables me to access the symbol table.
For example, I read an input file that could contain the following lines defining three arrays, one read from a file and two defined inline:
datafile countries countries.list datalist departments HR Admin Facilities Services Sales IT EMT enddata datalist employees joe smith andy bloggs dave simpson ian jones wendy carter jane allenby enddata
Later on in the same input file I may see a line saying
listitem employeesand I have to be able to access the corresponding array to retrieve a random element.
At the moment I'm thinking that I may be able to use a map of lists as a workaround, but I haven't really gone into my existing gawk code to think it through, and if pointers do exist it would make things much more straightforward.
