Map, Reduce and Filter

Understanding the functions map, reduce and filter will benefit you a lot. Why? Because they are essential concepts in functional programming. All three functions are present in other languages like JS or Python too. What they all have in common is transforming data, and returning the transformed state.

Map

Map transforms a structure based on a pattern, which can be applied to each element. The following code doubles all the number in the passed array:

map (\n -> n + 1) [1, 2, 3]

Returns "[2, 4, 6]"

We can also use a function to be passed into the Map, applied to each element:

addOne :: Int -> Int
addOne x = x + 1

newArr = map addOne [1, 2, 3]

The same works for predefined functions:

map show [1, 2, 3]
-- ["1","2","3"]

Filter

A filter can be applied to a structure, to only copy the values matching a certain pattern.

The following filter filters an array for all even numbers:

filter (\n -> mod n 2 == 0) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
-- [2, 4, 6]