:toarray bug???

RouterOS Scripting
1

First, let’s see what happens if one casts an existing normal array to an array using :toarray:

{
  :local a (1,2,3);
  :local b [:toarray $a];
  :put "a is $[:typeof $a] len $[:len $a]:";
  :put $a;
  :put "b is $[:typeof $b] len $[:len $b]:";
  :put $b;
  :put "equiv...";
  :if ($a=$b) do={:put "yes"} else={:put "no"}
}

OUTPUT:

a is array len 3:
1;2;3
b is array len 3:
1;2;3
equiv...
yes

NOW just change the initialization of the array to an associative array (I’m running RouterOS 6.22, FYI):

  :local a {"a"="A";"b"="B";"c"="C"};

BUGGY? OUTPUT:

a is array len 3:
a=A;b=B;c=C
b is array len 0:

equiv...
no

It sure seems to me that casting an associative array using :toarray should leave it unchanged.

(Please don’t ask the naive question “Why would you ever need to cast an array to an array if it’s already an array?” Asking that likely means you’ve not tried writing robust scripts that expect an array as input but can gracefully handle non-array data too in certain cases. If casting had worked as expected, then it would permit handling input data in several forms without having to add code to test input data types.)

Is this a bug?

Wondering…

Aaron out.

2

That is a bug.

Wait for next release of RouterOS for almost fixed version.

toarray will pass this array through
making this:

:local b [:toarray $a];

into this if $a is an array of any kind:

:local b  $a;

but if you construct string that would create arrays with key=value pairs, it will not parse it correctly. So it would be more useful for us to see your script to see what problem exactly you are having (or possible inputs you are fighting) to correct the problem as for now - the fix is kind of hack (hence the “almost”)

3

True to your word, 6.23 fixes the issue:

{
  :local a {"a"="A";"b"="B";"c"="C"};
  :local b [:toarray $a];
  :put "a is $[:typeof $a] len $[:len $a]:";
  :put $a;
  :put "b is $[:typeof $b] len $[:len $b]:";
  :put $b;
  :put "equiv...";
  :if ($a=$b) do={:put "yes"} else={:put "no"}
}

…now gives me the expected:

a is array len 3:
a=A;b=B;c=C
b is array len 3:
a=A;b=B;c=C
equiv...
yes

Thanks!