[Haskell-beginners] Re: mayBe stuck

[prad]

On Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:44:26 +0200
Jürgen Doser <jurgen.doser at gmail.com> wrote:

> For practice purposes, in particular for getting used to recursion, it
> might also be useful to write the function without any help of library
> functions, traversing the string using direct recursion only. For
> every character you encounter, what do you have to do in each case?
>
you are a good teacher, jurgen!
here's what i came up with:

br []       = []
br ss       = fst (tup) : br (tail (snd tup))
    where
        tup = break eqD ss

now this works great for

let s = "zaoeu%aeuasnt%staashaeu%nthdanoe%nthd%"

but i get a 
*** Exception: Prelude.tail: empty list

i found a neat way to explore recursion on ghci like this

Prelude> let s = "aoeu%snthi%ashuet"
Prelude> break (=='%') s
("aoeu","%snthi%ashuet")
Prelude> break (=='%') (tail (snd it))
("snthi","%ashuet")
Prelude> break (=='%') (tail (snd it))
("ashuet","")
Prelude> break (=='%') (tail (snd it))
*** Exception: Prelude.tail: empty list

of course this is the problem i'm having in that i'm forced to take the
tail of an empty list at the end. correcting it by sticking on a
delimiter doesn't seem to be the right thing to do though. so there
must be another way to deal with this. hmmm.

-- 
In friendship,
prad

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