Scala's for expression

A deeper look into Scala's for expression

joesan published on

3 min, 465 words

Categories: Technical Stuff

Tags: scala

This blog article takes a deeper look into Scala's for comprehensions. The for comprehension / expression in Scala has the following syntax:

  for ( seq ) yield expr


In deed a very simple syntax underneath which lies a very strong fundamental concept. The seq in the syntax above could be a sequence of generators, definitions, and filters each separated with a semicolon. Let us assume that we have to identify all the Persons from a List that matches a certain criteria. Of course this is Scala and there are zillions of way to do this, but the focus of this article is to discuss about for expressions. Let's now see how we can accomplish this in just 2 lines of code.

  val persons = List(person1, person2, person3)
for ( person <- persons; age = person.age; if(age > 18) ) yield person
// for (generator; definition; filter) yield value


In fact that was indeed a one liner. What we did was that we filtered for all persons that are 18 years or more old. Let's focus on each one of those sequences. Let's begin with the generator.

The generator syntax pat <- expr, where expr typically returns a type that can be iterated over. In simple terms, a generator is anything or rather any type that has a method map, flatMap and a filter. Let us verify this ourselves with the help of the following code:

  val myInt = 10
for ( i <- myInt; if(i > 10) ) yield i
error: value filter is not a member of Int
for ( i <- myInt; if(i > 10)) yield i
^


The code above fails for obvious reasons that type Int does not contain a filter method defined and hence does not qualify to be as a generator. Let's now modify it slightly and see what happens:

  val myIntList = List(1,2,3,4,5)
for ( i <- myIntList; if(i > 4) ) yield i // returns List(5)


The myIntList now qualifies as a generator as it satisfies the 3 conditions that we laid out earlier for a generator. Before going further, let me leave you with a slightly more complicated example. I will leave it to you so that you can figure that out by yourselves. If you have done nested for loops in Java, the answer should be pretty obvious.

  val list1 = List(0,1,2,3,4)
val list2 = List(5,6,7,8,9)
for ( i <- list1; x <- list2; if(i >= 4) ) yield i // ??? What happens?


Revisiting our Person list example:

  val persons = List(person1, person2, person3)
for {
person <- persons
age = person.age
if (age > 18)
} yield person


The generator iterates through the person list and for each person in the list, the age of that person is extracted into a local val age, the age is checked if it is greater than 18, if yes that person is added to the result of the for expression.