Thursday 1 July 2021

One last one! CFML higher-order functions compared to tag-based code: reduceRight

G'day:

I forgot one!

I've already discussed map, reduce, filter, sort, some, every and each, operations; but recently reduceRight was added to CFML (well: at least in ColdFusion it was; it's not in Lucee yet) as well.

I have to start my day job in 16min, so this will be quick.

reduceRight is the same as reduce, except it starts from the end of the collection, not the beginning:

colours = ["Whero","Karaka","Kowhai","Kakariki","Kikorangi","Poropango","Papura"]

coloursAsList = colours.reduce((all="", colour) => all.listAppend(colour))
coloursAsReversedList = colours.reduceRight((all="", colour) => all.listAppend(colour))

writeOutput("coloursAsList: #coloursAsList#<br>coloursAsReversedList: #coloursAsReversedList#<br>")
coloursAsList: Whero,Karaka,Kowhai,Kakariki,Kikorangi,Poropango,Papura
coloursAsReversedList: Papura,Poropango,Kikorangi,Kakariki,Kowhai,Karaka,Whero

Yes yes Mingo; one would not use reduce to convert an array of strings to a list. That is beside the point. But thanks for letting me know Lucee (but not ColdFusion) has an Array.reverse method, which would be a better way to reverse the list order here: colours.reverse().toList().

And the tags version, just a reversed counting loop does the trick here:

<cfset coloursAsReversedList = "">
<cfloop index="i" from="#arrayLen(colours)#" to="1" step="-1">
    <cfset coloursAsReversedList = listAppend(coloursAsReversedList, colours[i])>
</cfloop>

That's it. four minutes to get to work. Fortunately that's just a matter of switching desktops…

Righto.

--
Adam