How do you rotate (circular shift) of a Scala collection

Question

I can do this quite easily, and cleanly, using a for loop. For instance, if I wanted to traverse a Seq from every element back to itself I would do the

Answer 1

This ought to do it in a fairly generic way, and allow for arbitrary rotations:

def rotateLeft[A](seq: Seq[A], i: Int): Seq[A] = {
    val size = seq.size
    seq.drop(i % size) ++ seq.take(i % size)
}

def rotateRight[A](seq: Seq[A], i: Int): Seq[A] = {
    val size = seq.size
    seq.drop(size - (i % size)) ++ seq.take(size - (i % size))
}

The idea is simple enough, to rotate left, drop the first i elements from the left, and take them again from the left to concatenate them in the opposite order. If you don't mind calculating the size of the collection, you can do your operations modulo the size, to allow i to be arbitrary.

scala> rotateRight(seq, 1)
res34: Seq[Int] = List(5, 1, 2, 3, 4)

scala> rotateRight(seq, 7)
res35: Seq[Int] = List(4, 5, 1, 2, 3)

scala> rotateRight(seq, 70)
res36: Seq[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Similarly, you can use splitAt:

def rotateLeft[A](seq: Seq[A], i: Int): Seq[A] = {
    val size = seq.size
    val (first, last) = seq.splitAt(i % size)
    last ++ first
}

def rotateRight[A](seq: Seq[A], i: Int): Seq[A] = {
    val size = seq.size
    val (first, last) = seq.splitAt(size - (i % size))
    last ++ first
}

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To make it even more generic, using the enrich my library pattern:

import scala.collection.TraversableLike
import scala.collection.generic.CanBuildFrom

implicit class TraversableExt[A, Repr <: TraversableLike[A, Repr]](xs: TraversableLike[A, Repr]) {

    def rotateLeft(i: Int)(implicit cbf: CanBuildFrom[Repr, A, Repr]): Repr = {
        val size = xs.size
        val (first, last) = xs.splitAt(i % size)
        last ++ first
    }

    def rotateRight(i: Int)(implicit cbf: CanBuildFrom[Repr, A, Repr]): Repr = {
        val size = xs.size
        val (first, last) = xs.splitAt(size - (i % size))
        last ++ first
    }

}

scala> Seq(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).rotateRight(2)
res0: Seq[Int] = List(4, 5, 1, 2, 3)

scala> List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).rotateLeft(2)
res1: List[Int] = List(3, 4, 5, 1, 2)

scala> Stream(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).rotateRight(1)
res2: scala.collection.immutable.Stream[Int] = Stream(5, ?)

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Keep in mind these are not all necessarily the most tuned for performance, and they also can't work with infinite collections (none can).