Reading through the book “Learn you some Erlang for Great Good” and learned a bit more about List Comprehensions than I knew before. If you are new to the world of Erlang, you’ll soon discover these marvels. Here is some of what I know about them…

First, what exactly is a list comprehension? It’s a way to map and filter through List(s). Here is a small example of mapping, it multiples all values in the list by two.

List = [1,2,3,4].
[X*2 || X <- List]. %=> [2,4,6,8]

The X matches every element in the list on the right hand side of the || and the values are collected into a new list with the left-hand of X*2. The matching that happens here will ignore any mis-matches, as in the following example where non-fruit is filtered out of a list of tuples.

Foods = [{fruit, "Apple"},{vegetable, "Carrot"},{fruit, "Orange"}].
[{fruit, X} || {fruit, X} <- Foods]. %=> [{fruit, "Apple"},{fruit, "Orange"}].

This is just one way to filter down items. Another is to provide any number of clauses after the match, such as the following.

List = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9].
[X || X <- List, X rem 2 =:= 0]. %=> [2,4,6,8]

These filter expressions must evaluate to either true or false. They give you a more power over what is filtered when simple matching won’t work by itself.

You can have any number of lists, as long as you have at least one!

List = [1,2].
[{X,Y} || X <- List, Y <- List]. %=> [{1,1},{1,2},{2,1},{2,2}]

This creates a Cartesian product between the lists, which can be handy at times when you want to intersect lists perhaps.