Jay Fields is a software developer at DRW Trading. He has a passion for discovering and maturing innovative solutions. His most recent work has been in the Domain Specific Language space where he's delivered applications that empowered subject matter experts to write the business rules of the applications. He is also very interested in maturing software design through software testing. Jay is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 110 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

Clojure: Apply a Function To Each Value of a Map

08.22.2011
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I recently needed to update all of the values of map, and couldn't find an individual function in clojure.core that did the trick. Luckily, implementing an update-values function is actually very straightforward. The following function reduces the original map to a new map with the same elements, except the values are all the result of applying the specified function and any additional args.

(defn update-values [m f & args]

 (reduce (fn [r [k v]] (assoc r k (apply f v args))) {} m))
The code is concise, but perhaps a bit terse. Still, it does the trick, as the REPL session below demonstrates.
Clojure 1.2.0

user=> (defn update-values [m f & args]

 (reduce (fn [r [k v]] (assoc r k (apply f v args))) {} m))

#'user/update-values

user=> (update-values {:a 1 :b 2 :c 3} inc)

{:c 4, :b 3, :a 2}

user=> (update-values {:a 1 :b 2 :c 3} + 10)

{:c 13, :b 12, :a 11}

user=> (update-values {:a {:z 1} :b {:z 1} :c {:z 1}} dissoc :z)

{:c {}, :b {}, :a {}}
The last example is the specific problem I was looking to solve: remove a key-value pair from all the values of a map. However, the map I was working with actually had a bit of nesting. Let's define an example map that is similar to what I was actually working with.
user=> (def data {:boxes {"jay" {:linux 2 :win 1} "mike" {:linux 2 :win 2}}})

#'user/data
Easy enough, I have 2 linux boxes and 1 windows box, and Mike has 2 linux and 2 windows. But, now the company decides to discard all of our windows boxes, and we'll need to update each user. A quick combo of update-in with update-values does the trick.
user=> (update-in data [:boxes] update-values dissoc :win)

{:boxes {"mike" {:linux 2}, "jay" {:linux 2}}}
As you can see, the update-values function plays nice with existing Clojure functions as well.

Disclosure: I am long AAPL and own every device Apple puts out. Don't take my example numbers to literally. Also, much to my dismay, DRW has yet to discard all of our windows boxes.

From http://blog.jayfields.com/2011/08/clojure-apply-function-to-each-value-of.html

Published at DZone with permission of Jay Fields, author and DZone MVB.

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