Scala – Efficient iteration with index in Scala

iterationscala

Since Scala does not have old Java style for loops with index,

// does not work
val xs = Array("first", "second", "third")
for (i=0; i<xs.length; i++) {
  println("String #" + i + " is " + xs(i))
}

How can we iterate efficiently, and without using var's?

You could do this

val xs = Array("first", "second", "third")
val indexed = xs zipWithIndex
for (x <- indexed) println("String #" + x._2 + " is " + x._1)

but the list is traversed twice – not very efficient.

Best Answer

Much worse than traversing twice, it creates an intermediary array of pairs. You can use view. When you do collection.view, you can think of subsequent calls as acting lazily, during the iteration. If you want to get back a proper fully realized collection, you call force at the end. Here that would be useless and costly. So change your code to

for((x,i) <- xs.view.zipWithIndex) println("String #" + i + " is " + x)

Related Solutions

Javascript – How to skip to next iteration in jQuery.each() util

What they mean by non-false is:

return true;

So this code:

var arr = ["one", "two", "three", "four", "five"];
$.each(arr, function(i) {
  if (arr[i] == 'three') {
    return true;
  }
  console.log(arr[i]);
});

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

will log one, two, four, five.

Javascript – Why is using “for…in” for array iteration a bad idea

The reason is that one construct:

var a = []; // Create a new empty array.
a[5] = 5;   // Perfectly legal JavaScript that resizes the array.

for (var i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
    // Iterate over numeric indexes from 0 to 5, as everyone expects.
    console.log(a[i]);
}

/* Will display:
   undefined
   undefined
   undefined
   undefined
   undefined
   5
*/

can sometimes be totally different from the other:

var a = [];
a[5] = 5;
for (var x in a) {
    // Shows only the explicitly set index of "5", and ignores 0-4
    console.log(x);
}

/* Will display:
   5
*/

Also consider that JavaScript libraries might do things like this, which will affect any array you create:

// Somewhere deep in your JavaScript library...
Array.prototype.foo = 1;

// Now you have no idea what the below code will do.
var a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
for (var x in a){
    // Now foo is a part of EVERY array and 
    // will show up here as a value of 'x'.
    console.log(x);
}

/* Will display:
   0
   1
   2
   3
   4
   foo
*/

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Javascript – How to skip to next iteration in jQuery.each() util

Javascript – Why is using “for…in” for array iteration a bad idea

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