Thanks for the detailed replies!

The trick with using Span is neat, although it does seem more like a workaround than a true solution - it is making additional changes to the AST after all. Can I be sure that they won't influence my output in unexpected ways? (e.g. some obscure issue like auto-hyphenation in LaTeX, page breaks, etc.)

@jgm, I don't really care about performance that much in my application, but I did do some benchmarking by your suggestion: here's a separate repo. This is actually my first ever encounter with the GHC profiler, so it's rather crude. Do let me know if you'd like any more info. TLDR: it does look like using the Span trick is more performant than concatMap (%time 0.8 vs 0.9), while the number of invocations of the base function (theFine in my original example) remains perfectly unchanged.

@gwern
> If you do the concat trick, you start running into issues with how the `walk` operates exactly so it'll sometimes repeat operations or omit substitutions you expected to happen, and bottomUp/topDown sometimes cause issues like their own different omissions or just infinite loops (always fun).
This is scary! Correctness is certainly more important than speed. Do you have a concrete example where this issue occurs? If @jgm (the original author of pandoc!) is using this method and there are cases in which it behaves unexpectedly, this sounds worthy of an issue and/or a pull request on GitHub.
On Sunday, September 5, 2021 at 8:23:19 AM UTC+3 John MacFarlane wrote:

I have often used the method

> allIsFine = walk $ concatMap theFine

But I don't think this will be any more efficient than your
first version with `walk (filter $ not . isThe)`.
Actually, I'd be interested in seeing benchmarks with these
approaches, if efficiency matters enough to you to research
this more.

Another possibility is to walk with a function like

killThe :: Inline -> Inline
killThe (Str "the") = Str "" -- or: Span ("",[],[]) []
killThe x = x

This should be more efficient than the list versions, though
again it would be interesting to see benchmarks.



Ilia Zaihcuk <zoi...@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> Using pandoc-types' Walkable
> <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/pandoc-types-1.22/docs/Text-Pandoc-Walk.html#t:Walkable>
> class, what is the best-performing/most idiomatic way to filter out certain
> elements from a document?
>
> Say I wanted to remove all occurrences of the word "the" from a Pandoc. The
> best implementation I've been able to write for this is
>
> isThe :: Inline -> Bool
> isThe (Str "the") = True
> isThe _ = False
>
> removeThe :: Pandoc -> Pandoc
> removeThe = walk (filter $ not . isThe)
>
> Is this right? Does the use of filter here not mean an additional O(n)
> traversal happens on every list of Inlines?
>
> I feel like a better solution for this would be using
>
> filterThe :: Inline -> [Inline]
> filterThe (Str "the") = []
> filterThe x = [x]
>
> or something similar, but of course
>
> removeThe = walk filterThe
>
> does not typecheck. We need a -> a, meaning [Inline] -> [Inline] here.
>
>
> The same question actually applies to any transformation which "changes the
> number of elements":
>
> theFine :: Inline -> [Inline]
> theFine (Str "the") = [Str "the", Space, Str "fine"]
> theFine i = [i]
>
> allIsFine :: Pandoc -> Pandoc
> allIsFine = walk $ concatMap theFine
>
> Best,
>
> Ilia
>
> P.S. Sorry if this has been asked before. I feel it must be a common issue,
> but all I've been able to find is this thread
> <https://groups.google.com/g/pandoc-discuss/c/idlbnOk1ooE/m/_QVvaRprHVcJ>
> with its links, which are 7 years old now and seem to be calling for
> changes in pandoc. Everything else suggests stepping outside Haskell.
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pandoc-discuss" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pandoc-discus...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pandoc-discuss/915213fc-e4c4-480b-a6a2-fd3420777ddan%40googlegroups.com.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pandoc-discuss" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pandoc-discuss+unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pandoc-discuss/1473b62b-4b33-49b5-ac6d-52a5571d8068n%40googlegroups.com.