Search code examples
scalaeither

Efficient and/or idiomatic way to turn Seq[Either[String, Int]] to (Seq[String], Seq[Int])

Slightly simplifying, my problem comes from a list of strings input that I want to parse with a function parse returning Either[String,Int].

Then list.map(parse) returns a list of Eithers. The next step in the program is to format an error message summing up all the errors or passing on the list of parsed integers.

Lets call the solution I'm looking for partitionEithers.

Calling

partitionEithers(List(Left("foo"), Right(1), Left("bar")))

Would give

(List("foo", "bar"),List(1))

Finding something like this in the standard library would be best. Failing that some kind of clean, idiomatic and efficient solution would be best. Also some kind of efficient utility function I could just paste into my projects would be ok.

I was very confused between these 3 earlier questions. As far as I can tell, neither of those questions matches my case, but some answers there seem to contain valid answers to this question.

Solution

  • I don't really get the amount of contortions of the other answers. So here is a one liner:

    scala> val es:List[Either[Int,String]] = 
           List(Left(1),Left(2),Right("A"),Right("B"),Left(3),Right("C"))
es: List[Either[Int,String]] = List(Left(1), Left(2), Right(A), Right(B), Left(3), Right(C))

scala> es.foldRight( (List[Int](), List[String]()) ) { 
         case ( e, (ls, rs) ) => e.fold( l => ( l :: ls, rs), r => ( ls, r :: rs ) ) 
       }
res5: (List[Int], List[String]) = (List(1, 2, 3),List(A, B, C))