How to split a string in Haskell?

Question

Remember that you can look up the definition of Prelude functions!

http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/standard-prelude.html

Looking there, the definition of words is,

words   :: String -> [String]
words s =  case dropWhile Char.isSpace s of
                      "" -> []
                      s' -> w : words s''
                            where (w, s'') = break Char.isSpace s'

So, change it for a function that takes a predicate:

wordsWhen     :: (Char -> Bool) -> String -> [String]
wordsWhen p s =  case dropWhile p s of
                      "" -> []
                      s' -> w : wordsWhen p s''
                            where (w, s'') = break p s'

Then call it with whatever predicate you want!

main = print $ wordsWhen (==',') "break,this,string,at,commas"

There is a package for this called split.

cabal install split

Use it like this:

ghci> import Data.List.Split
ghci> splitOn "," "my,comma,separated,list"
["my","comma","separated","list"]

It comes with a lot of other functions for splitting on matching delimiters or having several delimiters.

If you use Data.Text, there is splitOn:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/text/0.11.2.0/doc/html/Data-Text.html#v:splitOn

This is built in the Haskell Platform.

So for instance:

import qualified Data.Text as T
main = print $ T.splitOn (T.pack " ") (T.pack "this is a test")

or:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

import qualified Data.Text as T
main = print $ T.splitOn " " "this is a test"

In the module Text.Regex (part of the Haskell Platform), there is a function:

splitRegex :: Regex -> String -> [String]

which splits a string based on a regular expression. The API can be found at Hackage.