From: "FlickGradley (Nick Bradley) via ruby-core" <ruby-core@...>
Date: 2023-08-18T04:28:58+00:00
Subject: [ruby-core:114403] [Ruby master Feature#19840] [Proposal] Expand Find pattern to Multiple Find

Issue #19840 has been reported by FlickGradley (Nick Bradley).

----------------------------------------
Feature #19840: [Proposal] Expand Find pattern to Multiple Find
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/19840

* Author: FlickGradley (Nick Bradley)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
----------------------------------------
Hello! I love Ruby's pattern matching features. I would like to propose an expansion of the Find pattern which allows the selection of multiple matching elements of an array.

I often find myself dealing with data like this:
``` ruby
{ results: [{ id: 1, name: "foo" }, { id: 2, name: "bar" }, ... ] }
```
My problem is that I need to retrieve all the `id` values from the nested array of hashes, and I don't know how many there will be in advance.

It seems that the Find pattern could be expanded from allowing `pattern` (matching a single element) to `*pattern`. Examples:

``` ruby
# Base case
case { results: [{ id: 1, name: "foo" }, { id: 2, name: "bar" }] }
in results: [*{ id: ids }]
  "matched: #{ids}"
else
  "not matched"
end
#=> matched: [1, 2]

# With * at the end (rest of args) - same result
case { results: [{ id: 1, name: "foo" }, { id: 2, name: "bar" }] }
in results: [*{ id: ids }, *]
  "matched: #{ids}"
else
  "not matched"
end
#=> matched: [1, 2]

# When one element doesn't match and there is no *rest
case { results: [{ name: "foo" }, { id: 2, name: "bar" }] }
in results: [*{ id: ids }]
  "matched: #{ids}"
else
  "not matched"
end
#=> not matched
```

Similarly, `*Constant` could work to pull out types with an As pattern:

``` ruby
case [1, 2, 3, "string"]
in *Integer => nums, *
  "matched: #{nums}"
else
  "not matched"
end
#=> matched: [1, 2, 3]
```

Other patterns would work in the same way. Essentially, this expands the concept of `*` in pattern matching to mean "a variable number of `things matching subpattern`". Today, the only pattern supported by `*` is a variable binding - but it could be any of the other subpatterns as well.

This proposal does imply that this would work:
``` ruby
a = 2
[1, 2, 2, 3] in [*, *^a, *]
#=> true
```

To me, the `*` represents the variable number of matches, so the syntax makes intuitive sense. But others may have different opinions about `*^` being adjacent.

It may also imply this would work, though we could restrict the number of non-variable patterns (in other words, patterns that have the possibility of not matching) to 1 per Array so that this isn't possible.. I'm not sure something like this would be useful or clear.

``` ruby
a = 2
[1, 2, "hello", "ruby"] in [*Integer, *String]
#=> true
```

This feature feels like the missing piece of the Find pattern to me - I often want to "Find Multiple". If others agree, I would be happy to contribute by working on this feature and creating a pull request.



-- 
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