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Scala how can I count the number of occurrences in a list
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Counting all elements in a list is a one-liner in Haskell:
count xs = toList (fromListWith (+) [(x, 1) | x <- xs])
Here is an example usage:
*Main> count "haskell scala"
[(' ',1),('a',3),('c',1),('e',1),('h',1),('k',1),('l',3),('s',2)]
Can this function be expressed so elegantly in Scala as well?
scala> "haskell scala".groupBy(identity).mapValues(_.size).toSeq
res1: Seq[(Char, Int)] = ArrayBuffer((e,1), (s,2), (a,3), ( ,1), (l,3), (c,1), (h,1), (k,1))
Recall group
from the Data.List library,
group :: [a] -> [[a]]
giving us:
map (head &&& length) . group . sort
a list-friendly and relatively "naive" implementation.
Another implementation:
def count[A](xs: Seq[A]): Seq[(A, Int)] = xs.distinct.map(x => (x, xs.count(_ == x)))
Going for a literal translation, let's try this:
// Implementing this one in Scala
def fromSeqWith[A, B](s: Seq[(A, B)])(f: (B, B) => B) =
s groupBy (_._1) mapValues (_ map (_._2) reduceLeft f)
def count[A](xs: Seq[A]) = fromSeqWith(xs map (_ -> 1))(_+_).toSeq
Scala's groupBy
makes this more complex than it needs to be -- there have been calls for groupWith
or groupInto
, but they didn't make Odersky's standard for standard library inclusion.