The delete Statement

You can remove an individual element of an array using the delete statement:

delete array[index]

Once you have deleted an array element, you can no longer obtain any value the element once had. It is as if you had never referred to it and had never given it any value.

Here is an example of deleting elements in an array:

for (i in frequencies)
  delete frequencies[i]

This example removes all the elements from the array frequencies.

If you delete an element, a subsequent for statement to scan the array will not report that element, and the in operator to check for the presence of that element will return zero (i.e. false):

delete foo[4]
if (4 in foo)
    print "This will never be printed"

It is important to note that deleting an element is not the same as assigning it a null value (the empty string, "").

foo[4] = ""
if (4 in foo)
  print "This is printed, even though foo[4] is empty"

It is not an error to delete an element that does not exist.

You can delete all the elements of an array with a single statement, by leaving off the subscript in the delete statement.

delete array

This ability is a gawk extension; it is not available in compatibility mode (see section Command Line Options).

Using this version of the delete statement is about three times more efficient than the equivalent loop that deletes each element one at a time.

The following statement provides a portable, but non-obvious way to clear out an array.

# thanks to Michael Brennan for pointing this out
split("", array)

The split function (see section Built-in Functions for String Manipulation) clears out the target array first. This call asks it to split apart the null string. Since there is no data to split out, the function simply clears the array and then returns.

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