idiom for producing comma-seperated lists?
Antony Courtney
antony@apocalypse.org
Fri, 08 Aug 2003 09:48:22 -0400
I often need to format a list of strings using some character as a
*seperator* rather than a terminator for the items. Is there some
simple combinator or idiom from the Prelude or standard libraries that
could be used for this purpose?
I ended up defining my own variation on foldr1 to solve this (code
below), but I'd be much happier using some more standard solution:
-- A variation on foldr1 that takes an extra argument to be returned if
-- the list is empty.
foldrs :: (a -> a -> a) -> a -> [a] -> a
foldrs f z [] = z
foldrs f _ xs = foldr1 f xs
-- Example: format a list of strings, using a comma as a seperator:
mkSepStr :: [String] -> String
mkSepStr xs = foldrs (\x s -> x ++ ", " ++ s) "" xs
t0 = mkSepStr [] -- ==> ""
t1 = mkSepStr ["hello"] -- ==> "hello"
t2 = mkSepStr ["10","20","30"] -- ==> "10, 20, 30"
What do the rest of you do to solve this particular problem? If there
isn't a standard solution, perhaps something like foldrs would be a
useful addition to the Prelude.
Thanks,
-antony
--
Antony Courtney
Grad. Student, Dept. of Computer Science, Yale University
antony@apocalypse.org http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/antony