Best way to turn a Lists of Eithers into an Either of Lists?

Question

I have some code like the below, where I have a list of Eithers, and I want to turn it into an Either of Lists ... in particular (in this case), if there are any Lefts in th

Answer 1

I kind of don't want any karma for this as it's a merge of Chris's answer and Viktor's from here.. but here's an alternative:

def split[CC[X] <: Traversable[X], A, B](xs: CC[Either[A, B]])
   (implicit bfa: CanBuildFrom[Nothing, A, CC[A]], bfb: CanBuildFrom[Nothing, B, CC[B]]) : (CC[A], CC[B]) =
  xs.foldLeft((bfa(), bfb())) {
    case ((as, bs), l@Left(a)) => (as += a, bs)
    case ((as, bs), r@Right(b)) => (as, bs += b)
  } match {
    case (as, bs) => (as.result(), bs.result())
  }

Example:

scala> val eithers: List[Either[String, Int]] = List(Left("Hi"), Right(1))
eithers: List[Either[String,Int]] = List(Left(Hi), Right(1))

scala> split(eithers)
res0: (List[String], List[Int]) = (List(Hi),List(1))