The other day at work an opportunity arose where I was hoping to sneak
some Haskell into the pipeline of tools used to process call detail
records (CDRs).  In the telecommunications industry, CDRs are used for
billing.  Each CDR is a single line record of 30 comma-separated
values.  Each line is approximately 240 characters in length.  The
task at hand is to replace field number 10 if a new value can be found
in a hashmap which is keyed using the contents of the field.

My colleague was going to write a C program (that's all he knows), but
I whipped up a trivial python program instead.  I was curious if a
haskell version could be faster and more elegant , but I have not been
able to beat my python version in either case.  So, I'm curious as to
how you would go about this task in Haskell.  The input files are
generally 300-400MB, and the hashmap will contain perhaps 20-30 items.

For those that know python, here is a very simple implementation that
happens to be very fast compared to my Haskell version and very short:

    for line in sys.stdin:
        fields = line.split(',')
        fields[9] = tgmap.get(fields[9], fields[9])
        print ",".join(fields),

For each line in standard input:

  - Splits the string on the comma: "field0,field1,...,field29" =>
    ["field0", "field1", ..., "field29"] to obtain a list of strings.

  - Gets the value associated with the key of field9 from tgmap, if it
    does not exist, it returns a default value which is the original
    value.  I.e., if it's not in the map, then don't replace the
    field.

  - Joins the list of fields with a comma to yield a string again
    which is printed out to standard output.  The join method on the
    string is a bit odd: ",".join([1,2,3]) => "1,2,3"

Here is my first Haskell attempt:

import Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8 as B hiding (map,foldr)
import Data.List (map)
import Data.Map as M hiding (map)

-- This is just a placeholder until I actually populate the map
tgmap = M.singleton (B.pack "Pete") (B.pack "Kazmier")

main = B.interact $ B.unlines . map doline . B.lines
    where doline    = B.join comma . mapIndex fixup . B.split ','
          fixup i s = if i==9 then M.findWithDefault s s tgmap else s
          comma     = B.pack ","

-- f is supplied the index of the current element being processed
mapIndex f xs = m f 0 xs
    where m f i [] = []
          m f i (x:xs') = f i x : m f (i+1) xs'

After talking with dons on #haskell, he cleaned my version up and
produced this version which gets rid of 'if' statement and makes
mapIndex stricter:

import Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8 as B hiding (map,foldr)
import Data.List (map)
import Data.Map as M hiding (map)

-- This will be populated from a file
dict = M.singleton (B.pack "Pete") (B.pack "Kazmier")

main = B.interact $ B.unlines . map doline . B.lines
    where doline    = B.join comma . mapIndex fixup . B.split ','
          comma     = B.singleton ','
          fixup 3 s = M.findWithDefault s s dict
          fixup n s = s

-- f is supplied the index of the current element being processed
mapIndex :: (Int -> ByteString -> ByteString) -> [ByteString] ->
[ByteString]
mapIndex f xs = m xs 0
    where m []      _ = []
          m (x:xs') i = f i x : (m xs' $! i+1)

That helped things a bit, but I must confess I don't understand how
the strictness improved things as I had assumed things were going to
be evaluated in a reasonable amount of time due to the printing of
output.  I thought IO was interlaced with the execution and thus I
wasn't going to have to concern myself over laziness.  In addition,
the function is able to generate new elements of the list on demand so
I thought it was a good citizen in the lazy world.  Could anyone help
explain?

And then he came up with another version to avoid the 'unlines', but
that did not that really speed things up significantly.  So, with all
that said, is there a better approach to this problem?  Perhaps a more
elegant Haskell solution?

Thanks,
Pete

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