Part of the Fundamentals of Functional Programming document.

Prev: FOFP 1.5 Creating functions

We've already seen our first higher-order function, map, in action. A close sibling is filter.

filter has the same pattern as map, in that it works on an Array, and applies the supplied function to each element of that Array in turn. In this case though, the function acts as a predicate, and only those elements for which the predicate evaluates to true are kept. The others are discarded, leaving you with a shorter collection.

Taking the odd ones

Let's explore with a simple example based on our short list of numbers:

var nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

If we were only interested in the odd numbers, we could do this:

nums.filter(function(x) { return x % 2 !== 0; })
// [1, 3, 5]

Pretty simple. Like we did with map, we could use a pre-defined (i.e. named) function instead:

function is_odd(x) { return x % 2 !== 0; }

nums.filter(is_odd)
// [1, 3, 5]

Declarative style

Notice that the program is starting to become easier to read, the more we move away from the mechanical nature of the imperative style of programming towards a more declarative style.

And it doesn't end there. If we wanted to take the numbers we'd filtered our list down to (1, 3 and 5) and transform them, all we'd need to do is chain calls together ... remember that map and filter both consume and produce lists. Remembering our times function from FOFP 1.5, we could form a chain like this:

nums.filter(is_odd)
    .map(times(4))
// [4, 12, 20]

Now that we've seen map and filter, it's time to have a look at their somewhat more powerful sibling, fold.