Zipping with padding in Haskell
- by Travis Brown
A couple of times I've found myself wanting a zip in Haskell that adds padding to the shorter list instead of truncating the longer one. This is easy enough to write. (Monoid works for me here, but you could also just pass in the elements that you want to use for padding.)
zipPad :: (Monoid a, Monoid b) => [a] -> [b] -> [(a, b)]
zipPad xs [] = zip xs (repeat mempty)
zipPad [] ys = zip (repeat mempty) ys
zipPad (x:xs) (y:ys) = (x, y) : zipPad xs ys
This approach gets ugly when trying to define zipPad3. I typed up the following and then realized that of course it doesn't work:
zipPad3 :: (Monoid a, Monoid b, Monoid c) => [a] -> [b] -> [c] -> [(a, b, c)]
zipPad3 xs [] [] = zip3 xs (repeat mempty) (repeat mempty)
zipPad3 [] ys [] = zip3 (repeat mempty) ys (repeat mempty)
zipPad3 [] [] zs = zip3 (repeat mempty) (repeat mempty) zs
zipPad3 xs ys [] = zip3 xs ys (repeat mempty)
zipPad3 xs [] zs = zip3 xs (repeat mempty) zs
zipPad3 [] ys zs = zip3 (repeat mempty) ys zs
zipPad3 (x:xs) (y:ys) (z:zs) = (x, y, z) : zipPad3 xs ys zs
At this point I cheated and just used length to pick the longest list and pad the others.
Am I overlooking a more elegant way to do this, or is something like zipPad3 already defined somewhere?
