In today’s Programming Praxis exercise we have to implement a run length encoding algorithm. The provided Scheme solution weighs in at 27 lines. Let’s see if we can do any better in Haskell.
First, two imports.
import Data.List import Data.List.Split
Compressing is easy: use group and chunk to separate the string into runs of the appropriate length and then apply tilde encoding as necessary.
compress :: String -> String compress s = f =<< chunk 26 =<< group s where f xs = if length xs < 4 && take 1 xs /= "~" then xs else '~' : toEnum (length xs + 64) : take 1 xs
Expanding is easier still and can be done entirely through pattern matching.
expand :: String -> String expand  =  expand ('~':r:c:xs) = replicate (fromEnum r - 64) c ++ expand xs expand (c:xs) = c : expand xs
And of course we have to test if everything works correctly.
main :: IO () main = do print $ compress org == rle print $ expand rle == org where org = "ABBB~CDDDDDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" rle = "ABBB~A~C~ED~ZE~DE"
Everything seems to be working and at 6 lines that’s 4,5 times shorter than the Scheme solution. Not bad.