Accessing elements in arrays

The ideal way to access an array element is to refer to that element via its index, as follows:

arr[index]

Here, arr is the name of an array, and index is the index of the desired element of the array that we want to access.

The following is a simple example of assigning and accessing AWK arrays:

$ vi arr_access.awk

BEGIN {
        arr[30] = "volvo"
        arr[10] = "bmw"
        arr[20] = "audi"
        arr[50] = "toyota"
        arr["car"] = "ferrari"
        arr[70] = "renault"
        arr[40] = "ford"
        arr[80] = "porsche"
        arr[60] = "jeep"
        print "arr[10]  : ", arr["10"]
        print "arr[car] : ", arr["car"]
        print "arr[80]  : ", arr["80"]
        print "arr[30]  : ", arr["30"]
}

$ awk  -f  arr_access.awk

The output of the execution of the preceding code is as follows:

arr[10]  : bmw
arr[car] : ferrari
arr[80]  : porsche
arr[30]  : volvo

In the preceding example, we can see that the array indexes are not in sequence. They don't begin...