Introduction
This article is part of the Scala knowledge bits Series.
Periodically, I will publish new exercises so you can slowly build up knowledge about Scala.
It is designed to be done in a very short amount of time and learn a little bit each day, just to create a routine.
This episode will teach you about Scala val pattern matching.
Hope you are going to enjoy it! It is designed for anyone to learn Scala from scratch and slowly learn, one Bit at a time.
After this Bit, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments down below.
Feel free to join the Discord server as well if you would like some help and support from the rest of our community.
What are we learning today?
Today we are going to learn about Scala val pattern matching !
Let’s see how pattern matching appear in other aspect of the language.
More specifically, how it shows up in val assignment.
Time to try on the exercise on your own and scroll down for more information when you are done or if you are stuck.
Exercise
Here is an exercise to complete today.
If I did my job well, you should be able to guess by yourself the solution based on what you previously learned and based on the clues.
But if you get stuck, scroll down to get more information.
The goal of the exercise is to replace the ??? by a piece of code so that the exercise compiles and that’s how you win! Good luck!
You can fill the exercise right in here:
Or, if it does not load, go on to Scastie (aLWSbioJT0ir0qACbt6yCg).
More information about Scala val pattern matching
In this exercise you will learn (or have learned, if you have already solved the puzzle) about Scala val pattern matching.
Using pattern matching in conjunction with val can be very useful especially when working with Tuple or other structures such as Option.
It allows you to extract only the part you need and leave behind the rest using the _ symbol.
However, you have to be extremely careful using pattern matching with val because you don’t have a case _ => to catch the not matched cases. Which means, you are going to trigger exception at runtime.
In the last example, if you give anything different than abc, the code is going to fail. But this failure happens at runtime, not at compile time which can be extremely bad and dangerous.
Use this carefully !
Feel free to go back to the exercise, modify the code to try out new things and get a better intuition for Scala val pattern matching.
Conclusion
I hope you have learned something new or had fun during this Scala Knowledge Bit.
Please ask questions or post feedback in the comments below.
Feel free to try on the next Scala Knowledege Bit.
If you are curious about the previous Scala knowledge Bits, go check it out! 🙂