This week's LFE Friday was translated with permission from the
Erlang Thursday
series by Steven Proctor.
This week's translator: Robert Virding.
Today's LFE Friday comes from PolyConf in a sunny Poznan and is on ordsets:union/2.
ordsets:union/2 takes two ordered sets and returns an merged ordered set of the arguments.
> (set set-a (ordsets:from_list '(1 1 2 3 5)))
(1 2 3 5)
> (set set-b (ordsets:new))
()
> (set set-c (ordsets:from_list '(3 1 4 1 5 9)))
(1 3 4 5 9)
> (set set-d (ordsets:from_list '(e d c b a)))
(a b c d e)
> (set union-ab (ordsets:union set-a set-b))
(1 2 3 5)
> (set union-ac (ordsets:union set-a set-c))
(1 2 3 4 5 9)
And because a string in LFE is just a list of characters, we can also create ordered sets from strings, and then get a union of the unique characters that are in two strings.
> (ordsets:from_list "Kermit")
"Keimrt"
> (ordsets:from_list '(75 101 114 109 105 116))
"Keimrt"
> (ordsets:from_list "Mississippi")
"Mips"
> (ordsets:union (ordsets:from_list "Kermit") (ordsets:from_list "Mississippi"))
"KMeimprst"
The ordsets modules also contains ordsets:union/1, which takes a list of ordered sets and returns the union of all the ordered sets in the list.
> (set union-ac (ordsets:union (list set-a set-c)))
(1 2 3 4 5 9)
> (set union-abc (ordsets:union (list set-b set-c set-a)))
(1 2 3 4 5 9)
> (set union-abcd (ordsets:union (list set-b set-c set-a set-d)))
(1 2 3 4 5 9 a b c d e)
> (set union-cd (ordsets:union (list set-c set-d)))
(1 3 4 5 9 a b c d e)
WARNING: While the representation for an ordered set is just a list, if you pass a list to ordsets:union/2 you will not get what you expect, as it expects the items in each "ordered set" to actually be ordered and a set.
> (ordsets:union '((1 2 3) (a b c)))
(1 2 3 a b c)
> (ordsets:union '((1 1 2 3 1 2) (a b c)))
(1 1 2 3 1 2 a b c)
> (ordsets:union '((1 1 2 3 1 2) (1 a b c)))
(1 1 2 3 1 2 a b c)
> (ordsets:union '((1 1 2 3 1 2) (1 a b c 1)))
(1 1 2 3 1 2 a b c 1)
-Proctor, Robert
