Parentheses matching in Scala --- functional approach

Question

Let's say I want to parse a string with various opening and closing brackets (I used parentheses in the title because I believe it is more common -- the question is the same nevertheless) so that I get all the higher levels separated in a list.

Given:

[hello:=[notting],[hill]][3.4(4.56676|5.67787)][the[hill[is[high]]not]]

I want:

List("[hello:=[notting],[hill]]", "[3.4(4.56676|5.67787)]", "[the[hill[is[high]]not]]")

The way I am doing this is by counting the opening and closing brackets and adding to the list whenever I get my counter to 0. However, I have an ugly imperative code. You may assume that the original string is well formed.

My question is: what would be a nice functional approach to this problem?

Notes: I have thought of using the for...yield construct but given the use of the counters I cannot get a simple conditional (I must have conditionals just for updating the counters as well) and I do not know how I could use this construct in this case.

Answer 1

Quick solution using Scala parser combinator library:

import util.parsing.combinator.RegexParsers

object Parser extends RegexParsers {
  lazy val t = "[^\\[\\]\\(\\)]+".r

  def paren: Parser[String] =
    ("(" ~ rep1(t | paren) ~ ")" |
     "[" ~ rep1(t | paren) ~ "]") ^^ {
      case o ~ l ~ c => (o :: l ::: c :: Nil) mkString ""
    }

  def all = rep(paren)

  def apply(s: String) = parseAll(all, s)
}

Checking it in REPL:

scala> Parser("[hello:=[notting],[hill]][3.4(4.56676|5.67787)][the[hill[is[high]]not]]")
res0: Parser.ParseResult[List[String]] = [1.72] parsed: List([hello:=[notting],[hill]], [3.4(4.56676|5.67787)], [the[hill[is[high]]not]])

Answer 2

What about:

def split(input: String): List[String] = {
  def loop(pos: Int, ends: List[Int], xs: List[String]): List[String] =
    if (pos >= 0)
      if ((input charAt pos) == ']') loop(pos-1, pos+1 :: ends, xs)
      else if ((input charAt pos) == '[')
        if (ends.size == 1) loop(pos-1, Nil, input.substring(pos, ends.head) :: xs)
        else loop(pos-1, ends.tail, xs)
      else loop(pos-1, ends, xs)
    else xs
  loop(input.length-1, Nil, Nil)
}

scala> val s1 = "[hello:=[notting],[hill]][3.4(4.56676|5.67787)][the[hill[is[high]]not]]"
s1: String = [hello:=[notting],[hill]][3.4(4.56676|5.67787)][the[hill[is[high]]not]]

scala> val s2 = "[f[sad][add]dir][er][p]"
s2: String = [f[sad][add]dir][er][p]

scala> split(s1) foreach println
[hello:=[notting],[hill]]
[3.4(4.56676|5.67787)]
[the[hill[is[high]]not]]

scala> split(s2) foreach println
[f[sad][add]dir]
[er]
[p]