Associative Arrays in Bash - What is an Associative Array and to Declare it

Declaring associative arrays

An associative array in bash is declared by using the declare -A command (How surprising, I know :D).

declare -A NameOfArray

For this example, we’ll use DOAssosArray

declare -A DOAssosArray

Initizialing/populating an associative array

Elements in the array can be initialized at the time of array declaration or after declaring the array variable

• Populating array variables AFTER it’s declaration

In the previous paragraph, we declared the array DOAssosArray. In order to populate it, we can execute the following commands:

DOAssosArray[KEY]=VALUE

The variable inside the brackets - [] will be the KEY and the value after the equal sign will be the VALUE.

Let’s make a more real-life example. We’ll use Countries as KEYS and Capitals as VALUES.

DOAssosArray[Germany]=Berlin
DOAssosArray[France]=Paris
DOAssosArray[Spain]=Madrid

---

• Populate the array on declaration

Let’s say we wanted to populate the associative array while we were creating it. This can be achieved by:

declare -A DOAssosArray ( [KEY]=VALUE [KEY]=VALUE [KEY]=VALUE )

or following our example like this:

declare -A DOAssosArray ( [Germany]=Berlin [France]=Paris [Spain]=Madrid )

Accessing elements in the Associative array

Elements in the associative array can be accessed individually or by using for and while loops.

• Accessing elements individually

You can access values in an associative array by calling its KEY:

echo ${DOAssosArray[KEY]}

in our case

echo ${DOAssosArray[Germany]}

The output will be Berlin.

root@DevServer:~$ echo ${DOAssosArray[Germany]}
Berlin                

Since this mini-tutorial is becoming far too long, we’ll review only accessing associative array elements individually and in the next part work through the other possibilities and even try to explore more of how associative array in BASH work and how we can manage them.