Updated 2014-02-03 16:01:06 by pooryorick ▲

A filter is a pipeline that produces data which represents an edited version of its input.

See Also  edit

the filter idiom
Tcl's simple syntax for reading and writing to stdin

and stdout makes it fairly easy to write these types of programs
How can I run data through an external filter?
a wrapper to handle the details of pipeline filtering:

Filter in functional programming edit

RS 2005-03-08: filter is also a classic operator in functional programming, and it makes nice simple code:
proc filter {list script} {
    set res {}
    foreach e $list {if {[uplevel 1 $script $e]} {lappend res $e}}
    set res
}

Testing, with a simple way to do intersection:
proc in {list e} {expr {[lsearch -exact $list $e]>=0}}

% filter {a b c} {in {b c d}}
b c

[lpz] 2013-06-09: The elements I use, have spaces, so I changed the filter proc to
proc filter {list script} {
    set res {}
    foreach e $list {if {[uplevel 1 $script [list $e]]} {lappend res $e}}
    set res
}

Testing
% filter { {s pace} x d}  {in {{s pace} a b c d e}}
{s pace} d

[smh2] 2006-08-26: Here is a proc based on this to find the intersection of many lists:
proc intersection { items } {
    set res [lindex $items 0]             ;    # start with the first sub-list
    foreach item [lrange $items 1 end] {  ;    # loop through the rest
        set res [filter $res {in $item}]   ;    # and filter each new subset against the next
    }
    set res
}

AMG: Implementation using lcomp:
proc filter {list test_expression} {
    lcomp {$x} for x in $list if $test_expression
}

test_expression is a boolean if expression that should be a function of $x, the list element being tested.

Category GlossaryCategory Functional Programming