lisp filter out results from list not matching predicate

Question

hey

I am trying to learn lisp, using emacs dialect and I have a question. let us say list has some members, for which predicate evaluates to false. how do I create a new list without those members? something like { A in L: p(A) is true }. in python there is filter function, is there something equivalent in lisp? if not, how do I do it?

Thanks

Answer 1

These functions are in the CL package, you will need to (require 'cl) to use them:

(remove-if-not 'evenp '(1 2 3 4 5))

This will return a new list with all even numbers from the argument.

Also look up delete-if-not, which does the same, but modifies its argument list.

Answer 2

I was looking for the very same last night and came across the Elisp Cookbook on EmacsWiki. The section on Lists/Sequences contains filtering teqniques and show how this can be done with mapcar and delq. I had to mod the code to use it for my own purposes but here is the original:

;; Emacs Lisp doesn’t come with a ‘filter’ function to keep elements that satisfy 
;; a conditional and excise the elements that do not satisfy it. One can use ‘mapcar’ 
;; to iterate over a list with a conditional, and then use ‘delq’ to remove the ‘nil’  
;; values.

   (defun my-filter (condp lst)
     (delq nil
           (mapcar (lambda (x) (and (funcall condp x) x)) lst)))

;; Therefore

  (my-filter 'identity my-list)

;; is equivalent to

  (delq nil my-list)

;; For example:

  (let ((num-list '(1 'a 2 "nil" 3 nil 4)))
    (my-filter 'numberp num-list))   ==> (1 2 3 4)

;; Actually the package cl-seq contains the functions remove-if and remove-if-not. 
;; The latter can be used instead of my-filter.