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

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 11:21:37AM -0500, Gwern Branwen wrote:

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Robert Clausecker 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