Reduce isn't limited to scalar operations; it can also be used to sort things into buckets. (This is what I use reduce for most often).
Imagine a case in which you have a list of objects, and you want to re-organize it hierarchically based on properties stored flatly in the object. In the following example, I produce a list of metadata objects related to articles in an XML-encoded newspaper with the articles function. articles generates a list of XML elements, and then maps through them one by one, producing objects that hold some interesting info about them. On the front end, I'm going to want to let the user browse the articles by section/subsection/headline. So I use reduce to take the list of articles and return a single dictionary that reflects the section/subsection/article hierarchy.
from lxml import etree
from Reader import Reader
class IssueReader(Reader):
def articles(self):
arts = self.q('//div3') # inherited ... runs an xpath query against the issue
subsection = etree.XPath('./ancestor::div2/@type')
section = etree.XPath('./ancestor::div1/@type')
header_text = etree.XPath('./head//text()')
return map(lambda art: {
'text_id': self.id,
'path': self.getpath(art)[0],
'subsection': (subsection(art)[0] or '[none]'),
'section': (section(art)[0] or '[none]'),
'headline': (''.join(header_text(art)) or '[none]')
}, arts)
def by_section(self):
arts = self.articles()
def extract(acc, art): # acc for accumulator
section = acc.get(art['section'], False)
if section:
subsection = acc.get(art['subsection'], False)
if subsection:
subsection.append(art)
else:
section[art['subsection']] = [art]
else:
acc[art['section']] = {art['subsection']: [art]}
return acc
return reduce(extract, arts, {})
I give both functions here because I think it shows how map and reduce can complement each other nicely when dealing with objects. The same thing could have been accomplished with a for loop, ... but spending some serious time with a functional language has tended to make me think in terms of map and reduce.
By the way, if anybody has a better way to set properties like I'm doing in extract, where the parents of the property you want to set might not exist yet, please let me know.
