[erlang-questions] Additions to lists module

[Michael McDaniel]

 Sweet - that gets more to how I'm interested in using it, also;
 thanks, Richard.


~Michael


On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 03:30:40PM +1300, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>
> On 27 Nov 2008, at 12:52 pm, Michael McDaniel wrote:
>
>>
>> Everyone works on different kinds of problems and has their solutions.
>> One immediate use I thought of follows.
>>
>> Note that html_tokenise is from Joe Armstrong's www_tools-1.0 on  
>> trapexit.
>>
>>
>> {ok, H} = http:request("http://somewebsite.com") ,
>> Ht      = html_tokenise:string2toks( element(3, H) ) ,
>> Pos     = list_position:pos( Hal, {tagStart,"title"} ) ,
>>
>> {_, Title} = lists:nth( Pos+1, Hal ).
>
> This is better as
>
> 	{_,Title} = lists:after({tagStart,"title"}, Hal)
>
> where
> 	after(X, [X,Y|_]) -> Y;
> 	after(X, [_|Ys])  -> after(X, Ys).
>
>
> which does the job in one pass.  The *order* and *adjacency*
> of elements in a list often matters; the actual *positions*
> far less often.
>
> If we add
>
> 	before(X, [Y,X|_]) -> Y;
> 	before(X, [_|Ys])  -> before(X, Ys).
>
> then we've matched the #after: and #before: methods in
> ANSI Smalltalk's SequencedReadableCollection class.
> If we add
>
> 	after(X, [X,Y|_], _) -> Y;
> 	after(X, [_|Ys],  D) -> after(X, Ys, D);
> 	after(_, [],      D) -> D.
>
> 	before(X, [Y,X|_], _) -> Y;
> 	before(X, [_|Ys],  D) -> before(X, Ys, D);
> 	before(_, [],      D) -> D.
>
> then we've come close to matching the #after:ifAbsent:
> and #before:ifAbsent: methods (which actually take funs
> rather than default values).
>
> Even simpler than after would be to adapt Lisp's (MEMBER - -)
> function, and instead of returning false or true, return the
> empty list or the place where the match was found.  (Funny
> how the Boolean anti-pattern keeps turning up, isn't it?)
> Define
>
> 	lmember(X, Xs = [X|_]) -> X;
> 	lmember(X, [_ | Xs])   -> lmember(X, Xs);
> 	lmember(_, [])         -> [].
>
> Then
>
> 	[_,{_,Title}|_] = lmember({tagStart,"title"}, Hal)
>
> and if we wanted to pick up the next two elements it would
> be just as simple to do
>
> 	[_,{_,Title},Next|_] = lmember({tagStart,"title"}, Hal)
>
>
>

-- 
Michael McDaniel
Portland, Oregon, USA
http://autosys.us