Jira (PUP-6091) Lookup CLI should use unquoted dot in key as sub-lookup

[Henrik Lindberg (JIRA)]

Title: Message Title

Henrik Lindberg commented on PUP-6091   Re: Lookup CLI should use unquoted dot in key as sub-lookup In the puppet language I am contemplating that we should support a more comprehensive slice, but it is somewhat muddled by the fact that it can only be supported on arrays. Currently you have to write a long chain of [key] in puppet, and if you want to protect against an undef somewhere in the chain it gets quite horrible. $lookup('root')[key1][key2][0][key3] That would be much more nicely expressed as: $lookup('root')[key1, key2, 0, key3] However if the first level returns an Array, that does not work since it slices a range from the Array, so you would have to navigate to the first hash in the drill down before being able to use the "multi key" access. OTOH, supporting the dot notation "natively" in puppet will not work as the dot means "member call". That is simply not going to work. One option is to add a function that slices like the dot notation. lookup(¨root').access(key1, key2, 0, key3) I think that is the best option; easy to understand and implement. The other alternative is to support the 'sub-lookup' in lookup everywhere (or worse UX, have an option in the call that allows users to state something like sublookup => true (which then requires quoting if key has verbatim dots). Using exactly the same notation in the lookup key is not nice; working with strings in puppet to construct keys is not fun (say you want to iterate over 0-n for the numeric part in the example above. So, no - I do not want the dot notation as keys in puppet. I can imagine supporting an array though since lookup does not support keys to be arrays. lookup(['root', key1, key2, 0, key3]) Now to the CLI. As facter and hiera already set the precedence, it is hard to suggest something other than the dot notation to drill down into the produced value. To avoid the confusion, it could accept an extra argument --access that accepts a string in dot notation - that would at least make the CLI similar even if not identical to how it is done in puppet. i.e. the command line for the above example would be: lookup root --access key1.key2.0.key3 Or if we wanted, we could also support giving it as an array like in puppet: lookup root --access '[key1, key2, 0, key3]' Add Comment   This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v6.4.13#64028-sha1:b7939e9) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Bugs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to puppet-bugs+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to puppet-bugs@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/puppet-bugs. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.