11.2.8.5 Rewrite Statements

The Rewrite statements are: expressions, assignments, conditional statements, and return statements. A statement is terminated by a semicolon.

Expressions

An expression is one of the following:

• A variable identifier
• A type coercion expression
• An arithmetic expression
• A boolean expression
• An assignment
• A function call
• A delete statement

Type coercion

`(' type `)' ident

The result of type coercion is as follows:

type	Variable type	Resulting conversion
integer	integer	No conversion. This results in the same integer value.
integer	string	If the string value of the variable is a valid ASCII representation of the integer number (either decimal, octal, or hex), it is converted to the integer; otherwise the result of the conversion is undefined.
string	integer	The ASCII representation (in decimal) of the integer number.
string	string	No conversion. This results in the same string value.

Assignment

ident = expression ;

The variable ident is assigned the value of expression.

Function calls

ident ( arg-list )

where ident is the identifier representing the function, and arg-list is a comma-separated list of expressions supplying actual arguments to the function. The number of the expressions must correspond exactly to the number of formal parameters in the function definition. The function that ident references can be either a compiled function or a built-in function.

`delete' statement

The `delete' statement is used to delete an attribute or attributes from the incoming request. Its syntax is:

delete attribute-name; delete attribute-name(n);

The first variant deletes all the attributes of the given type. The second variant deletes only the nth occurrence of the matching attribute.