Is there an equivalent to Arrays.asList() in Scala?
Or rather, how would you take a String and convert it into an Array, and then a List in Scala?
Any advice would be appreciated.
One common use of Arrays.asList is to produce a list containing the given elements:
Arrays.asList(x, y, z);
The Scala equivalent to that is just
Seq(x, y, z)
The other is to turn an existing array into list:
Arrays.asList(array);
In Scala, this is
array.toSeq
(note that I use Seq instead of List here; in Scala, List is a specific implementation, not an interface. Depending on what you want to do with it, some other type can be appropriate).
Or in many cases, nothing at all. Because Array[A] is implicitly convertible to IndexedSeq[A], collection operations can be done directly on it without converting first.
The same applies to String, with a caveat that operations Lists are good at are quite uncommon for strings, so string.toList is even less likely to be appropriate.
Related
What is the best way to convert a tuple into an array in Scala? Here "best" means in as few lines of code as possible. I was shocked to search Google and StackOverflow only to find nothing on this topic, which seems like it should be trivial and common. Lists have a a toArray function; why don't tuples?
Use productIterator, immediately followed by toArray:
(42, 3.14, "hello", true).productIterator.toArray
gives:
res0: Array[Any] = Array(42, 3.14, hello, true)
The type of the result shows the main reason why it's rarely used: in tuples, the types of the elements can be heterogeneous, in arrays they must be homogeneous, so that often too much type information is lost during this conversion. If you want to do this, then you probably shouldn't have stored your information in tuples in the first place.
There is simply almost nothing you can (safely) do with an Array[Any], except printing it out, or converting it to an even more degenerate Set[Any]. Instead you could use:
Lists of case classes belonging to a common sealed trait,
shapeless HLists,
a carefully chosen base class with a bit of inheritance,
or something that at least keeps some kind of schema at runtime (like Apache Spark Datasets)
they would all be better alternatives.
In the somewhat less likely case that the elements of the "tuples" that you are processing frequently turn out to have an informative least upper bound type, then it might be because you aren't working with plain tuples, but with some kind of traversable data structure that puts restrictions on the number of substructures in the nodes. In this case, you should consider implementing something like Traverse interface for the structure, instead of messing with some "tuples" manually.
Motivations
This question is about working with Lists of data in Scala, and about resorting to either tuples or class objects for holding data. Perhaps some of my assumptions are wrong, so there it goes.
My current approach
As I understand, tuples do not afford the possibility of elegantly addressing their elements beyond the provided ._1, ._2, etc. I can use them, but code will be a bit unpleasant wherever data is extracted far from the lines of code that had defined it.
Also, as I understand, a Scala Map can only use a single type declaration for its values, so it can't diversify the value type of its values except for the case of type inheritance. (to the later point, considering the use of a type hierarchy for Map values "diversity" - may seem to be very artificial unless a class hierarchy fits any "model" intuition to begin with).
So, when I need to have lists where each element contains two or more named data entities, e.g. as below one of type String and one of type List, each accessible through an intelligible name, I resort to:
case class Foo (name1: String, name2: List[String])
val foos: List[Foo] = ...
Then I can later access instances of the list using .name1 and .name2.
Shortcomings and problems I see here
When the list is very large, should I assume this is less performant or more memory consuming than using a tuple as the List's type? alternatively, is there a different elegant way of accomplishing struct semantics in Scala?
In terms of performance, I don't think there is going to be any distinction between a tuple and an instance of a cases class. In fact, a tuple is an instance of a case class.
Secondly, if you're looking for another, more readable way to get the data out of the tuple, I suggest you consider pattern matching:
val (name1, name2) = ("first", List("second", "third"))
I have realized that my typical way of passing Scala collections around could use some improvement.
def doSomethingCool(theFoos: List[Foo]) = { /* insert cool stuff here */ }
// if I happen to have a List
doSomethingCool(theFoos)
// but elsewhere I may have a Vector, Set, Option, ...
doSomethingCool(theFoos.toList)
I tend to write my library functions to take a List as the parameter type, but I'm certain that there's something more general I can put there to avoid all the occasional .toList calls I have in the application code. This is especially annoying since my doSomethingCool function typically only needs to call map, flatMap and filter, which are defined on all the collection types.
What are my options for that 'something more general'?
Here are more general traits, each of which extends the previous one:
GenTraversableOnce
GenTraversable
GenIterable
GenSeq
The traits above do not specify whether the collection is sequential or parallel. If your code requires that things be executed sequentially (typically, if your code has side effects of any kind), they are too general for it.
The following traits mandate sequential execution:
TraversableOnce
Traversable
Iterable
Seq
LinearSeq
The first one, TraversableOnce only allows you to call one method on the collection. After that, the collection has been "used". In exchange, it is general enough to accept iterators as well as collections.
Traversable is a pretty general collection that has most methods. There are some things it cannot do, however, in which case you need to go to Iterable.
All Iterable implement the iterator method, which allows you to get an Iterator for that collection. This gives it the capability for a few methods not present in Traversable.
A Seq[A] implements the function Int => A, which means you can access any element by its index. This is not guaranteed to be efficient, but it is a guarantee that each element has an index, and that you can make assertions about what that index is going to be. Contrast this with Map and Set, where you cannot tell what the index of an element is.
A LinearSeq is a Seq that provides fast head, tail, isEmpty and prepend. This is as close as you can get to a List without actually using a List explicitly.
Alternatively, you could have an IndexedSeq, which has fast indexed access (something List does not provide).
See also this question and this FAQ based on it.
The most obvious one is to use Traversable as the most general trait which will have the goodies you want. However, I think you are generally better sticking to:
Seq
IndexedSeq
Set
Map
A Seq will cover List, Vector etc, IndexedSeq will cover Vector etc etc. I found myself not using Iterable because I often need (or want) to know the size of the thing I have and back pre scala-2.8 Iterable did not provide access to this, so I kept having to turn things into sequences anyway!
Looks like Traversable and Iterable now have size methods so maybe I should go back to using them! Of course you could start "going mad" with GenTraversableOnce but that is not likely to aid in readability.
There's something I don't understand about Scala's collection.mutable.Seq. It describes the interface for all mutable sequences, yet I don't see methods to append or prepend elements without creating a new sequence. Am I missing something obvious here?
There are :+ and +: for append and prepend, respectively, but they create new collections — in order to be consistent with the behavior of immutable sequences, I assume. This is fine, but why is there no method like += and +=:, like ArrayBuffer and ListBuffer define, for in-place append and prepend? Does it mean that I cannot refer to a mutable seq that's typed as collection.mutable.Seq if I want to do in-place append?
Again, I must have missed something obvious, but cannot find what…
Mutability for sequences only guarantees that you'll be able to swap out the items for different ones (via the update method), as you can with e.g. primitive arrays. It does not guarantee that you'll be able to make the sequence larger (that's what the Growable trait is for) or smaller (Shrinkable).
Buffer is the abstract trait that contains Growable and Shrinkable, not Seq.
I'm using a library (JXPath) to query a graph of beans in order to extract matching elements. However, JXPath returns groups of matching elements as an instance of java.lang.Iterator and I'd rather like to convert it into an immutable scala list. Is there any simpler way of doing than iterating over the iterator and creating a new immutable list at each iteration step ?
You might want to rethink the need for a List, although it feels very familiar when coming from Java, and List is the default implementation of an immutable Seq, it often isn't the best choice of collection.
The operations that list is optimal for are those already available via an iterator (basically taking consecutive head elements and prepending elements). If an iterator doesn't already give you what you need, then I can pretty much guarantee that a List won't be your best choice - a vector would be more appropriate.
Having got that out the way... The recommended technique to convert between Java and Scala collections (since Scala 2.8.1) is via scala.collection.JavaConverters. This gives you more control than JavaConversions and avoids some possible implicit conflicts.
You won't have a direct implicit conversion this way. Instead, you get asScala and asJava methods pimped onto collections, allowing you to perform the conversions explicitly.
To convert a Java iterator to a Scala iterator:
javaIterator.asScala
To convert a Java iterator to a Scala List (via the scala iterator):
javaIterator.asScala.toList
You may also want to consider converting toSeq instead of toList. In the case of iterators, this'll return a Stream - allowing you to retain the lazy behaviour of iterators within the richer Seq interface.
EDIT:
There's no toVector method, but (as Daniel pointed out) there's a toIndexedSeq method that will return a Vector as the default IndexedSeq subclass (just as List is the default Seq).
javaIterator.asScala.toIndexedSeq
EDIT: You should probably look at Kevin Wright's answer, which provides a better solution available since Scala 2.8.1, with less implicit magic.
You can import the implicit conversions from scala.collection.JavaConversions and then create a new Scala collection seamlessly, e.g. like this:
import collection.JavaConversions._
println(List() ++ javaIterator)
Your Java iterator is converted to a Scala iterator by JavaConversions.asScalaIterator. A Scala iterator with elements of type A implements TraversableOnce[A], which is the argument type needed to concatenate collections with ++.
If you need another collection type, just change List() to whatever you need (e.g., IndexedSeq() or collection.mutable.Seq(), etc.).