Sunday 11 April 2010

A tiny Scala case class to clean up user input

We needed some cleaning up of user input entered into a text field. We ended up with a Scala case class that cleans up its constructor string argument a bit, by removing multiple whitespace characters and trimming it. It behaves like this:

scala> Text("    a       a      ") == Text("a a")                                                                
res0: Boolean = true
scala> Text(" a a ").text == Text("a a").text
res1: Boolean = true
scala> Text(" a a ").text
res2: java.lang.String = a a

The code looks like this:
case class Text(private var _text: String) {
val text = _text.trim.replaceAll(" +", " ")
_text = text
}
Since the input string, var _text, is private, we can manipulate it a bit, without making it possible for others to tamper with. I'm not sure if this is the obvious way to do it, but it seems to work as intended.

We tried a similar version that did not work:
// Doesn't work
case class BrokenText(private var _text: String) {
_text = _text.trim.replaceAll(" +", " ")
val text = _text
}
This version does not work since Text.text will return the original string, not the cleaned up one:
scala> BrokenText("    a      b      ")
res0: BrokenText = BrokenText(a b)
scala> res0.text
res1: String = a b
scala>
Why the second version doesn't work? Beats me. (But I'm sure the answer will turn out to be obvious.)

Update: See the two anonymous comments below: one answering my question above, the other one suggesting a neater way of handling it. Thanks.