dict.fish

Treat a key/value paired array like a dictionary in Fish

The Fish shell lacks the concept of a key/value dictionary. Sometimes referred to as an "associative array", shells like Zsh and Bash already have this concept built in.

There's an open issue to add this feature, but it's been 12 years and counting... Hopefully this plugin will tide you over.

This Fish plugin gives you a simple dict command, which lets you treat an array like it is an associative array.

Install

Use Fisher to install:

fisher install mattmc3/dict.fish

Usage

Use --help to show usage:

> dict --help
dict [-h|--help]
dict keys [DICTNAME]
dict values [DICTNAME]
dict get [DICTNAME] [KEY]
dict set [DICTNAME] [KEY] [VALUE]
dict remove [DICTNAME] [KEY]
dict contains [-k|--key] [-v|--value] [-i|--index] [DICTNAME] [STRING]

Let's demonstrate how to use a dict. We start with a regular Fish array, the only difference being that the elements of the array are paired (eg: key1 value1 key2 value2 etc..). Let's declare an array called fruits with the keys being types of fruit and the values containing the fruit's color.

> set fruits banana yellow cherry red grape purple

To get an element from a dictionary, use the get subcommand.

> dict get fruits grape
purple

To set an element from a dictionary, use the set subcommand.

> dict set fruits lime green
> echo $fruits
lime green banana yellow cherry red grape purple

To remove an element from a dictionary, use the remove subcommand.

> dict remove fruits grape
> echo $fruits
lime green banana yellow cherry red

We can use the keys and values subcommands to see all the keys and values respectively:

> dict keys fruits
lime
banana
cherry
> dict values fruits
green
yellow
red

Let's say we want to see if a key (or value) exists in the dictionary. We can use the contains subcommand. If the --key flag is provided, only keys are checked. Similarly, if --value is provided, only values are checked. Otherwise both are. If the --index flag is provided, then the index is printed.

> dict contains --key fruits cherry; and echo "found"; or echo "not found"
found
> dict contains --value fruits orange; and echo "found"; or echo "not found"
not found

If you want to use the original array, sometimes it's nice to use bracketed indexing.

> set key_cherry (dict contains -ki fruits cherry)
> echo $fruits[$key_cherry]
red