Am Donnerstag 29 April 2010 21:37:15 schrieb Jean-Nicolas Jolivet:
First I would like to thank everyone for the very interesting replies and suggestions I got so far!...
I tried to implement (and at the very least understand) most of them!...
To add to the context here, what I am trying to do is:
-apply a "transformation" to a character (in my case, subtracting 42 to its ASCII value, which I obtain with chr(ord(c) - 42) -if the character is preceded by a specific character (that would be, an escape character, in this case '=') then subtract 106 to its value instead of 42... -if the character is the escape character itself, '=', then skip it altogether
Ah, that complicates matters a little. - What happens if ord c < 42 (ord c < 106, if c is preceded by the escape character?) - What about escaped escape characters? However, foo xs = catMaybes $ zipWith f (' ':xs) xs where f _ '=' = Nothing f '=' c = Just (chr $ ord c - 106) f _ c = Just (chr $ ord c - 42) is still pretty simple, as is the direct recursion foo = go ' ' where go _ ('=' :cs) = go '=' cs go '=' (c:cs) = chr (ord c - 106) : go c cs go _ (c:cs) = chr (ord c - 42) : go c cs go _ _ = [] -- assuming that only characters > 'i' (chr 105) are escaped (or the escape character itself, but that should be dropped regardless). fooGen :: Char -> (Char -> Char) -> (Char -> Char) -> String -> String fooGen e esc norm str = catMaybes $ zipWith f (d:str) str where d = if e == maxBound then pred e else succ e f x y | y == e = Nothing | x == e = Just (esc y) | otherwise = Just (norm y) is an easy generalisation.
(keeping in mind that the next character needs to be escaped)...
I managed to do it, however I'm not totally satisfied in the way I did it... the problem was that... as I just explained, in some cases, the character that is being processed has to be "skipped" (and by that I mean, not added to the resulting string). This happens when the processed character IS the escape character...
What I did was to build a List of Maybe Char.... my function does the proper operation on the character and returns a "Just Char" when the character is processed, or Nothing when it is the escaped character... so basically I would end up with something like: [Just 'f', Just 'o', Just 'o', Nothing]... I am mapping this using mapMaybe to end up with a proper String...
Would there be any more efficient way of doing this?
That is already pretty efficient. The direct recursion is probably a bit more efficient, but I don't think the difference will be large.
Considering that the escape character should NOT be added to the resulting string, is there any way I can avoid using the Maybe monad?
Sure, apart from the direct recursion, fooGen e esc norm str = tail $ foldr f [] (d:str) where d = if e == maxBound then pred e else succ e f x (y:zs) | y == e = x:zs | x == e = x:esc y:zs | otherwise = x:norm y:zs f x [] = [x] catMaybes and zipWith is clearer, though, and I don't think the foldr will perform better.
Once again, thanks everyone for all the suggestions!
Jean-Nicolas Jolivet