F# Split list into sublists based on comparison of adjacent elements

This is an interesting problem! I needed to implement exactly this in C# just recently for my article about grouping (because the type signature of the function is pretty similar to groupBy, so it can be used in LINQ query as the group by clause). The C# implementation was quite ugly though.

Anyway, there must be a way to express this function using some simple primitives. It just seems that the F# library doesn’t provide any functions that fit for this purpose. I was able to come up with two functions that seem to be generally useful and can be combined together to solve this problem, so here they are:

// Splits a list into two lists using the specified function
// The list is split between two elements for which 'f' returns 'true'
let splitAt f list =
  let rec splitAtAux acc list = 
    match list with
    | x::y::ys when f x y -> List.rev (x::acc), y::ys
    | x::xs -> splitAtAux (x::acc) xs
    | [] -> (List.rev acc), []
  splitAtAux [] list

val splitAt : ('a -> 'a -> bool) -> 'a list -> 'a list * 'a list

This is similar to what we want to achieve, but it splits the list only in two pieces (which is a simpler case than splitting the list multiple times). Then we’ll need to repeat this operation, which can be done using this function:

// Repeatedly uses 'f' to take several elements of the input list and
// aggregate them into value of type 'b until the remaining list 
// (second value returned by 'f') is empty
let foldUntilEmpty f list = 
  let rec foldUntilEmptyAux acc list =
    match f list with
    | l, [] -> l::acc |> List.rev
    | l, rest -> foldUntilEmptyAux (l::acc) rest
  foldUntilEmptyAux [] list

val foldUntilEmpty : ('a list -> 'b * 'a list) -> 'a list -> 'b list

Now we can repeatedly apply splitAt (with some predicate specified as the first argument) on the input list using foldUntilEmpty, which gives us the function we wanted:

let splitAtEvery f list = foldUntilEmpty (splitAt f) list

splitAtEvery (<>) [ 1; 1; 1; 2; 2; 3; 3; 3; 3 ];;
val it : int list list = [[1; 1; 1]; [2; 2]; [3; 3; 3; 3]]

I think that the last step is really nice :-). The first two functions are quite straightforward and may be useful for other things, although they are not as general as functions from the F# core library.