Scala: short form of pattern matching that returns Boolean

Question

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 1

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