grep and map-Two magical operators

Over the years I have extensively used map and grep in Perl, JavaScript, Python, Linux. I am sure most of the programmers love using these two operators. Read below some of my personal notes gathered from several resources and own understanding.

map – transforms the values of a list

The “map” function applies a transformation to each element of a list and returns the result, leaving the original list unchanged. A map can also be seen as the form of foreach loop but with the map, the implementation is much cleaner.

Ex: map { $_ => undef} is better than, map{$_=>1} the former one will save memory. It’s a better idea to use undef instead of 1.

Instead of one scalar of the value ‘1’ for every key, you get to share the same undef value for all the keys and thus don’t have to allocate tons of memory you aren’t going to use anyway.

The above idiom is a simple way of creating a list of unique values from another list, as the output of the code aptly demonstrates. However, with all those curly braces it may not be immediately obvious what’s going on, so let’s break it down.

map { $_ => 1 } @list

This is pretty straight-forward – create a list of key-value pairs where the keys are the values from @list

{ map { $_ => 1 } @list }

The surrounding pair of curly braces creates an anonymous hash which is populated with they key-value pairs from the map statement. So we now have a hash reference to an anonymous hash whose keys are the elements from @list, and because hash keys are unique, the keys of the anonymous hash represents a unique set of values.

keys %{ { map { $_ => 1 } @list } }

Finally, with the last pair of curly braces, the hash reference to the anonymous hash is dereferenced and we get its list of keys.

grep – filters a list

The “grep” function returns only the elements of a list that meet a certain condition:

@positive_numbers = grep($_ > 0, @numbers);

As you can see, each element is refered to as “$_”. This (plus the fact that parentheses are optional) allows you write commands that look similar to invocations of the Unix “grep” program:

@non_blank_lines = grep /S/, @lines;

In addition, you can specify a code block rather than a single condition:

@non_blank_lines = grep { /S/ } @lines; # Equivalent to the above.

Obviously it doesn’t matter in this case, but code blocks are helpful when you want a complex filter with multiple lines of code. The result of the code block is the result of the last statement executed:
`

All positive numbers can be used as exponents,

but negative exponents must be integers.

@can_be_used_as_exponent = grep {
if ( $_ < 0 ) {
! /./; # No decimal point -> integer.
}
else {
1; # Always true.
}
} @array;`

What “grep” and “map” have in common?

"grep" and "map" have a lot in common. They both “magically” take a piece of code (either an expression or a code block) as a parameter. You need to put a comma after an expression but shouldn’t put a comma after a code block. Changing "$_" in "grep" or "map" will change the original list.

This isn’t generally a good idea because it makes the code hard to read. Remember that "map" builds a list of results by evaluating an expression, NOT by setting "$_". A side effect of this fact is that you should not use "s///" with "map". The "s///" operator changes "$_" rather than returning a result, so you won’t get what you would expect if you use it with "map" (and you CERTAINLY shouldn’t use it with "grep").

Happy programming!

References:
Discussion on PerlMonks
perldoc