Scala: short form of pattern matching that returns Boolean
I found myself writing something like this quite often:
a match {
case `b` => // do stuff
case _ => // do nothing
}
Is there a shorter way to check if some value matches a pattern? I mean, in this case I could just write if (a == b) // do stuff, but what if the pattern is more complex? Like when matching against a list or any pattern of arbitrary complexity. I'd like to be able to write something like this:
if (a matches b) // do stuff
I'm relatively new to Scala, so please pardon, if I'm missing something big :)
Answer
This is exactly why I wrote these functions, which are apparently impressively obscure since nobody has mentioned them.
scala> import PartialFunction._
import PartialFunction._
scala> cond("abc") { case "def" => true }
res0: Boolean = false
scala> condOpt("abc") { case x if x.length == 3 => x + x }
res1: Option[java.lang.String] = Some(abcabc)
scala> condOpt("abc") { case x if x.length == 4 => x + x }
res2: Option[java.lang.String] = None