Clojure: how to get an element of a vector in another vector

Question

I am very new to Clojure and am having difficulties understanding the operations of vectors/lists/maps. I am trying to print out the names of all the customers in data, but I cannot figure out how. Please help.

(def data
"1|John Smith|123 Here Street|456-4567
2|Sue Jones|43 Rose Court Street|345-7867
3|Fan Yuhong|165 Happy Lane|345-4533")

(defn test
[]
  (let [lines       (str/split-lines data)
        line-vecs-1 (mapv #(str/split % #"\|" ) lines)]
       (for [x line-vector-c] (print (line-vector-c 1))
       )
  )
)

gives me:

 [2 Sue Jones 43 Rose Court Street 345-7867][2 Sue Jones 43 Rose Court Street 
 345-7867][2 Sue Jones 43 Rose Court Street 345-7867]

what I want:

"John Smith"
"Sue Jones"
"Fang Yuhong"

Answer 1

What you've got so far (slightly rewritten) is:

(mapv (fn [l]
        (str/split l #"\|"))
      (str/split-lines data))

(str/split-lines data) splits the lines into a sequence of strings:

["1|John Smith|123 Here Street|456-4567"
 "2|Sue Jones|43 Rose Court Street|345-7867"
 "3|Fan Yuhong|165 Happy Lane|345-4533"]

(mapv #(str/split % #"\\|") lines) splits each line into tuples of strings:

[["1" "John Smith" "123 Here Street" "456-4567"] 
 ["2" "Sue Jones" "43 Rose Court Street" "345-7867"]
 ["3" "Fan Yuhong" "165 Happy Lane" "345-4533"]]

Now you want to transform each tuple of strings into just the 2nd element of each tuple. There are a couple of functions you could use for that: get or nth (both are zero-based).

For example:

(mapv (fn [l]
        (get (str/split l #"\|")
             1))
      (str/split-lines data))

Answer 2

You can get a list of names using

(def names
  (sequence
    (comp
      (map #(str/split % #"\|"))
      (map second))
    (str/split-lines data)))

Then print each name with

(doseq [n names]
  (println n))

I often use sequence and composed transducers to explore data, as it's convenient for building up transformations one step at a time.

Answer 3

You can split each line and get the second column like this

(defn test [xs]
    (->> (str/split-lines xs)       ;split lines
         (map #(str/split % #"\|")) ;get columns
         (map second)))             ;only the second element of each line

and print the result

(map println (test data))

or better using doseq for printing only

(doseq [n (test data)]
  (println n))

Answer 4

Using RegEx:

(map second (re-seq #"\|(.*?)\|" data))

returns:

("John Smith" "Sue Jones" "Fan Yuhong")

Explaining:

re-seq

We ask re-seq to find at each line the first content between a pair of | . The ? in the regex means we want a non greedy search.

(re-seq #"\|(.*?)\|" data)

returns:

(["|John Smith|" "John Smith"] ["|Sue Jones|" "Sue Jones"] ["|Fan Yuhong|" "Fan Yuhong"])

map

Finally, we use map second to visit each element of the list and get only the second string of the vector.