8.1.5 Scanning All Elements of an Array

In programs that use arrays, it is often necessary to use a loop that executes once for each element of an array. In other languages, where arrays are contiguous and indices are limited to positive integers, this is easy: all the valid indices can be found by counting from the lowest index up to the highest. This technique won’t do the job in awk, because any number or string can be an array index. So awk has a special kind of for statement for scanning an array:

for (var in array)
  body

This loop executes body once for each index in array that the program has previously used, with the variable var set to that index.

The following program uses this form of the for statement. The first rule scans the input records and notes which words appear (at least once) in the input, by storing a one into the array used with the word as index. The second rule scans the elements of used to find all the distinct words that appear in the input. It prints each word that is more than 10 characters long and also prints the number of such words. See section String-Manipulation Functions, for more information on the built-in function length().

# Record a 1 for each word that is used at least once
{
    for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++)
        used[$i] = 1
}

# Find number of distinct words more than 10 characters long
END {
    for (x in used) {
        if (length(x) > 10) {
            ++num_long_words
            print x
        }
    }
    print num_long_words, "words longer than 10 characters"
}

See section Generating Word-Usage Counts, for a more detailed example of this type.

The order in which elements of the array are accessed by this statement is determined by the internal arrangement of the array elements within awk and normally cannot be controlled or changed. This can lead to problems if new elements are added to array by statements in the loop body; it is not predictable whether the for loop will reach them. Similarly, changing var inside the loop may produce strange results. It is best to avoid such things.

As an extension, gawk makes it possible for you to loop over the elements of an array in order, based on the value of PROCINFO["sorted_in"] (see section Built-in Variables That Convey Information). This is an advanced feature, so discussion of it is delayed until Controlling Array Traversal.

In addition, gawk provides built-in functions for sorting arrays; see Sorting Array Values and Indices with gawk.