[Haskell-cafe] Why is there no "splitSeperator" function in Data.List

[Iustin Pop]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 11:21:37AM -0500, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Robert Clausecker <fuzxxl at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is there any reason, that one can't find a function that splits a list
> > at a seperator in the standard library? I imagined something like this:
> >
> >
> >    splitSeperator :: Eq a => a -> [a] -> [[a]]
> >
> >    splitSeperator ',' "foo,bar,baz"
> >      --> ["foo","bar","baz"]
> >
> > Or something similar? This is needed so often, even if I can implement
> > it in one line, is there any reason why it's not in the libs?
> 
> See http://hackage.haskell.org/package/split
> 
> The reason it's not in Data.List is because there are a bazillion
> different splits one might want (when I was pondering the issue before
> Brent released it, I had collected something like 8 different proposed
> splits), so no agreement could ever be reached.

It is curious though that the Python community managed to agree on a
single implementation and include that in the standard library… So it is
possible :)

I also needed a split function and ended up with coding one that behaves
like the Python one for my project.

regards,
iustin