Finding the first matching object in a collection, functionally

[Jens Alfke]

A couple of times I’ve had the need to find the first (or just any) element of a collection that passes some test. Of course the traditional way to do this is to run a ‘for’ loop over the collection, test each element, and break when you find the match. But I wanted to do it functionally.

There doesn’t seem to be an existing operator for this. There’s a first( ) function but it just returns the first item in a collection. The closest thing I can find is to use filter( ) and then take the first element of the result, e.g.:
let bob = people.filter({$0.firstName == “bob”}).first
At first glance this looks inefficient — what if there are zillions of items that match the test? — but reading between the lines I’m guessing that filter may be lazy, generating items on demand, so stopping after the first one means the test would only succeed once. Is that true?

—Jens

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

Regular filter() is not lazy, but the Swift standard library supports lazy Sequences:

    lazy(people).filter { your test here }

Unfortunately, there's no way to first() the resulting Sequence, but that's easy to write:

    func first<Seq: SequenceType>(seq: Seq) -> Seq.Generator.Element? {

        var generator = seq.generate()

        return generator.next()

    }

HTH,

—Brent

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[Jens Alfke]

Thanks! But if I’m going to write custom code to do this, I think I’d just rather write a function that iterates the collection and returns the first matching element, since it’s simpler and probably faster.

—Jens