ZSH autocomplete option parsing: Accessing the completed value

Question

I have an autocompletion script, with this snippet:

_arguments \
  '-project[project file]:project:->projects'

...

case "$state" in
...
  projects)
    local -a projects
    projects=(*.project)
    _multi_parts / projects
    echo "$SELECTED_PROJECT" > /tmp/project
    ;;
...

How can I get access to the user-selected option from _multi_parts / projects such that there is a variable $SELECTED_PROJECT that is accessible to other parts of the completion script?

I have other options in the _arguments declaration that are dependent on which project the user has selected, but I can't seem to find a way to get access to it.

Answer 1

Inside a completion function, the words that are already present on the command line are available in the $words array.

You can find examples of using $words with _arguments in the completion functions that ship with Zsh.