Ivy-read with alist

[jtamagnan]

It seems like ivy-read no longer works properly with an alist.
For example the following code snippet will message "one" instead of "1" if the first option is chosen

(ivy-read "Choose: "
      '(("one" . 1) ("two". 2) )
      :action (lambda (x) (interactive) (message "%s" x)))

This problem also occurs with counsel-hydra-heads which renders it useless

P.S. Maybe that is how ivy-read is supposed to work and I misunderstood and counsel-hydra-heads is not working for some other reason. This was just my initial impression as to what ivy-read was supposed to do when given an alist.

[abo-abo]

Thanks, should be fixed now. A cdr call now needs to be added.

[boyechko]

Could you confirm that passing an alist as the collection (as in jtamagnan's code snippet) actually is not supposed to allow for the user to get a list of "one" and "two" while the :action function would get the choice as 1 and 2, respectively?

I'm trying to present the user with a choice of file names that would then resolve to absolute file paths. Is the following workaround really what one must do, given a list of absolute file paths in files-list?

(let ((choices (mapcar #'(lambda (file)
                           (cons (file-name-base file) file))
                       files-list)))
  (cdr (assoc (ivy-read "Which file to open? " choices) choices)))

Rather than, say, the following, which is what I expected to be able to do:

(ivy-read "Which file to open? "
          (mapcar #'(lambda (file)
                      (cons file (file-name-base file)))
                  files))

What's the point of being able to pass alists or hash tables to ivy-read if only the keys are ever used, disregarding the values? Is it just a matter of it not being implemented yet?

[abo-abo]

@hoybach No need for a workaround, everything works as far as I'm aware:

(ivy-read "Choose: "
          '(("one" . 1) ("two" . 2))
          :action
          (lambda (x)
            (insert (format
                     "car: %s cdr: %d"
                     (car x) (cdr x)))))

Calling this will result in car: one cdr: 1 being inserted. The trouble with the above snippet was the result of ivy-read was "one", even though ("one" . 1) was passed into the action, and the result of the eval will overwrite what the action printed.

[boyechko]

@abo-abo Oh, I see now. Thanks a lot for the more detailed explanation and the example!