Question

Suppose that I have an array. I want to remove all the elements within the array that have a given value. Does anyone know how to do this? The value I am trying to remove may occur more than once and the array is not necessarily sorted. I would prefer to filter the array in-place instead of creating a new array. For example, removing the value 2 from the array [1, 2, 3, 2, 4] should produce the result [1, 3, 4].

This is the best thing I could come up with:

T[] without(T)(T[] stuff, T thingToExclude) {
    auto length = stuff.length;
    T[] result;
    foreach (thing; stuff) {
        if (thing != thingToExclude) {
            result ~= thing;
        }
    }
    return result;
}

stuff = stuff.without(thingToExclude);
writeln(stuff);

This seems unnecessarily complex and inefficient. Is there a simpler way? I looked at the std.algorithm module in the standard library hoping to find something helpful but everything that looked like it would do what I wanted was problematic. Here are some examples of things I tried that didn’t work:

import std.stdio, std.algorithm, std.conv;

auto stuff = [1, 2, 3, 2, 4];
auto thingToExclude = 2;

/*  Works fine with a hard-coded constant but compiler throws an error when
    given a value unknowable by the compiler:
    variable thingToExclude cannot be read at compile time */
stuff = filter!("a != " ~ to!string(thingToExclude))(stuff);
writeln(stuff);

/*  Works fine if I pass the result directly to writeln but compiler throws
    an error if I try assigning it to a variable such as stuff:
    cannot implicitly convert expression (filter(stuff)) of type FilterResult!(__lambda2,int[]) to int[] */
stuff = filter!((a) { return a != thingToExclude; })(stuff);
writeln(stuff);

/*  Mysterious error from compiler:
    template to(A...) if (!isRawStaticArray!(A)) cannot be sliced with [] */
stuff = to!int[](filter!((a) { return a != thingToExclude; })(stuff));
writeln(stuff);

So, how can I remove all occurrences of a value from an array without knowing the indexes where they appear?

Answer 1

std.algorithm.filter is pretty close to what you want: your second try is good.

You’ll want to either assign it to a new variable or use the array() function on it.

auto stuffWithoutThing = filter!((a) { return a != thingToExclude; })(stuff);
// use stuffWithoutThing

or

stuff = array(filter!((a) { return a != thingToExclude; })(stuff));

The first one does NOT create a new array. It just provides iteration over the thing with the given thing filtered out.

The second one will allocate memory for a new array to hold the content. You must import the std.array module for it to work.