Alternative of bash's `history -p` in zsh?

Question

In bash, history -p does history expansion on its argument; What is the alternative in zsh?

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any, but see the histverify option which changes the behaviour of history expansion so that when you press enter on a line that contains history operators, the expansion is performed in the editor buffer without running the command.

$ setopt histverify
$ echo !!Enter
$ echo setopt histverifyEnter
setopt histverify

Also note that in zsh like in csh (where history expansion comes from in the late 70s) history modifiers (like :h, :r, :A...) can also be applied to parameter expansions ($var:h...).

And the whole history is accessible with the $history special associative array.

Keys of that associative arrays are the history numbers, and contrary to regular associative arrays where the order is undefined, $history[@] is sorted in descending order on the numerical value of the key.

So ${history:0:1} is the last history entry. So, you can use parameter expansion operators to get the same result as with history expansion operators. For instance: !$:h, could be ${${(z)history:0:1}[-1]:h}

Answer 2

In bash you can expand a command by doing this:

history -p !23 

So if in 23 you have ls -l the, return will be:

ls 
-l 

In zsh i am able to reproduce a similar (but not identical) behavior by doing this:

history 23 23 | xargs -n1 | tail -n+2