Cookbook/Lists and strings

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Lists

In Haskell, lists are what Arrays are in most other languages.

Creating simple lists

Problem Solution Examples
creating a list with given elements -
3 : 12 : 42 : []        --> [3,12,42]
'f' : 'o' : 'o' : []    --> "foo"
creating a list with stepsize 1 -
[1..10]                 --> [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
['a'..'z']              --> "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
creating a list with different stepsize -
[1,3..10]               --> [1,3,5,7,9]
['a','c'..'z']          --> "acegikmoqsuwy"
creating an infinite constant list -
[1,1..]                   --> [1,1,1,1,1,...
creating an infinite list with stepsize 1 -
[1..]                 --> [1,2,3,4,5,...

List comprehensions

The list of all squares can also be written in a more comprehensive way, using list comprehensions:

squares = [x*x | x <- [1..]]

List comprehensions allow for constraints as well:

-- multiples of 3 or 5
mults = [ x | x <- [1..], mod x 3 == 0 || mod x 5 == 0 ]


Combining lists

Problem Solution Examples
combining two lists (++)
"foo" ++ "bar"                  --> "foobar"
[42,43] ++ [60,61]              --> [42,43,60,61]
combining many lists concat
concat ["foo", "bar", "baz"]    --> "foobarbaz"

Accessing sublists

Problem Solution Examples
accessing the first element head
head "foo bar baz"      --> 'f'
accessing the last element last
last "foo bar baz"      --> 'z'
accessing the element at a given index (!!)
"foo bar baz" !! 4      --> 'b'
accessing the first n elements take
take 3 "foo bar baz"    --> "foo"
accessing the last n elements reverse , take
reverse . take 3 . reverse $ "foobar"    --> "bar"
accessing the n elements starting from index m drop, take
take 4 $ drop 2 "foo bar baz"            --> "o ba"

Splitting lists

Problem Solution Examples
splitting a string into a list of words words
words "foo bar\t baz\n"    --> ["foo","bar","baz"]
splitting a list into two parts splitAt
splitAt 3 "foo bar baz"    --> ("foo"," bar baz")

Strings

Since strings are lists of characters, you can use any available list function.

Multiline strings

"foo\
\bar"               --> "foobar"

Converting between characters and values

Problem Solution Examples
converting a character to a numeric value ord
import Data.Char
ord 'A'    --> 65
converting a numeric value to a character chr
import Data.Char
chr 99     --> 'c'

Reversing a string by words or characters

Problem Solution Examples
reversing a string by characters reverse
reverse "foo bar baz"                        --> "zab rab oof"
reversing a string by words words, reverse, unwords
unwords $ reverse $ words "foo bar baz"      --> "baz bar foo"
reversing a string by characters by words words, reverse, map, unwords
unwords $ map reverse $ words "foo bar baz"  --> "oof rab zab"

Converting case

Problem Solution Examples
converting a character to upper-case toUpper
import Data.Char
toUpper 'a'            --> 'A'
converting a character to lower-case toLower
import Data.Char
toLower 'A'            --> 'a'
converting a string to upper-case toUpper, map
import Data.Char
map toUpper "Foo Bar"  --> "FOO BAR"
converting a string to lower-case toLower, map
import Data.Char
map toLower "Foo Bar"  --> "foo bar"

Interpolation

TODO

Performance

Text handles character strings with better performance than Strings; it should be the prefered data type for UTF-8 encoded strings.

If observe that Text does not give sufficient performance, consider Data.ByteString, which is essentially a byte array. It can contain UTF-8 characters, but handle with care! .

Unicode

Current GHC (later than 6) encodes Strings and Text in UTF-8. This may change the behavior of some of the functions explained above when applied to characters beyond the traditional ASCII characters. Remember that not every character in UTF-8 encoding is one byte!