Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/ircmaxell/monad-php

A simple Monad library for PHP
https://github.com/ircmaxell/monad-php

Last synced: about 2 months ago
JSON representation

A simple Monad library for PHP

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
MonadPHP

========



This is a basic Monad library for PHP.



Usage

=====



Values are "wrapped" in the monad via either the constructor: `new MonadPHP\Identity($value)` or the `unit()` method on an existing instance: `$monad->unit($value);`



Functions can be called on the wrapped value using `bind()`:



    use MonadPHP\Identity;

    $monad = new Identity(1);

    $monad->bind(function($value) { var_dump($value); });

    // Prints int(1)



All calls to bind return a new monad instance wrapping the return value of the function.



     use MonadPHP\Identity;

    $monad = new Identity(1);

    $monad->bind(function($value) {

            return 2 * $value;

        })->bind(function($value) { 

            var_dump($value); 

        });

    // Prints int(2)



Additionally, "extracting" the raw value is supported as well (since this is PHP and not a pure functional language)...



    use MonadPHP\Identity;

    $monad = new Identity(1);

    var_dump($monad->extract());

    // Prints int(1)



Maybe Monad

===========



One of the first useful monads, is the Maybe monad. The value here is that it will only call the callback provided to `bind()` if the value it wraps is not `null`.



    use MonadPHP\Maybe;

    $monad = new Maybe(1);

    $monad->bind(function($value) { var_dump($value); });

    // prints int(1)



    $monad = new Maybe(null);

    $monad->bind(function($value) { var_dump($value); });

    // prints nothing (callback never called)...



The included Chain monad does the same thing, but providing a short-cut implementation for objects:



    use MonadPHP\Chain;

    $monad = new Chain($someChainableObject);

    $obj = $monad->call1()->call2()->nonExistantMethod()->call4()->extract();

    var_dump($obj);

    // null



This can prevent errors when used with chaining...



List Monad

==========



This abstracts away the concept of a list of items (an array):



    use MonadPHP\ListMonad;

    $monad = new ListMonad(array(1, 2, 3, 4));

    $doubled = $monad->bind(function($value) { return 2 * $value; });

    var_dump($doubled->extract());

    // Prints array(2, 4, 6, 8)



Note that the passed in function gets called once per value, so it only ever deals with a single element, never the entire array...



It also works with any `Traversable` object (like iterators, etc). Just be aware that returning the new monad that's wrapped will alwyas become an array...



Composition

===========



These Monads can be composed together to do some really useful things:



    use MonadPHP\ListMonad;

    use MonadPHP\Maybe;



    $monad = new ListMonad(array(1, 2, 3, null, 4));

    $newMonad = $monad->bind(function($value) { return new Maybe($value); });

    $doubled = $newMonad->bind(function($value) { return 2 * $value; });

    var_dump($doubled->extract());

    // Prints array(2, 4, 6, null, 8)



Or, what if you want to deal with multi-dimensional arrays?



    use MonadPHP\ListMonad;

    $monad = new ListMonad(array(array(1, 2), array(3, 4), array(5, 6)));

    $newMonad = $monad->bind(function($value) { return new ListMonad($value); });

    $doubled = $newMonad->bind(function($value) { return 2 * $value; });

    var_dump($doubled->extract());

    // Prints array(array(2, 4), array(6, 8), array(10, 12))



There also exist helper constants on each of the monads to get a callback to the `unit` method:



    $newMonad = $monad->bind(Maybe::unit);

    // Does the same thing as above 



Real World Example

==================



Imagine that you want to traverse a multi-dimensional array to create a list of values of a particular sub-key. For example:



    $posts = array(

        array("title" => "foo", "author" => array("name" => "Bob", "email" => "[email protected]")),

        array("title" => "bar", "author" => array("name" => "Tom", "email" => "[email protected]")),

        array("title" => "baz"),

        array("title" => "biz", "author" => array("name" => "Mark", "email" => "[email protected]")),

    );

    

What if we wanted to extract all author names from this data set. In traditional procedural programming, you'd likely have a number of loops and conditionals. With monads, it becomes quite simple.



First, we define a function to return a particular index of an array:



    function index($key) {

        return function($array) use ($key) {

            return isset($array[$key]) ? $array[$key] : null;

        };

    }

    

Basically, this just creates a callback which will return a particular array key if it exists. With this, we have everything we need to get the list of authors.



    $postMonad = new MonadPHP\ListMonad($posts);

    $names = $postMonad

        ->bind(MonadPHP\Maybe::unit)

        ->bind(index("author"))

        ->bind(index("name"))

        ->extract();

        

Follow through and see what happens!