ircII help - assign

Usage: ASSIGN [[-]<user-variable> []]

ASSIGN lets you create user variables which are automatically expanded by ircII in aliases using the $variable-name format. For example, if you had defined:

    assign me The Big Cheese

Then, in an alias, $me would expand to "The Big Cheese". These are straight textual substitutions. You can use these kind of variables as counters and indexes into lists as well. For example:

    assign index 0
    assign index ${index+1}

The first line sets "index" to 0, the seconds increments index by 1. Note that the second will always be expanded if used in another alias (where $ are normally expanded). If you want it to be expanded if typed at the input line, you must first set/input_aliases to ON.

Note: In the above example, the mathematical expression must be enclosed by {}'s otherwise the + would be treated as an alias delimiter and the addition not performed. (See @ as well)

Suppose now you wanted to use index to get a single word in a list, you could do:

    alias WORD echo $($index)

Then doing:

    WORD This is a test

would display the index'th word in the list. The $($index) format does the following: it parses the text between the () as a sub-alias. The "$index" is thus evaluated and returns its value. This value is then replaced for the () expression and evaluated. So, if you had:

    assign index 1

Then, the following would be evaluated:

    $index becomes 1 which given
    $(1) which becomes simply $1

Thus the $1 argument is used. This functionality can be nested. This the following:

    assign A Hey You!
    assign B A
    assign C B
    alias NESTING echo $($($C))

will cause NESTING to display "Hey You!"

The following format are also legal:

    $#name     evaluates to the number of words in name
    $@name     evaluates to the number of characters in name

You can use these with the mathematical expressions as well, for example:

    assign foo Testing One Two
    echo $#foo $@foo
    assign junk ${#foo + @foo}

The echo line will display 3 15 and the variable junk have the value 18.

Additionally, values assigned wit SET FUNCTION_RETURN are taken to be the return value of a function.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There is a special version of this command called '@' for use in aliases and scripts. It is well suited to mathematical operations. Its use over ASSIGN is highly recommended.

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