Forum Discussion
Can SCAN() and BYROW() be combined?
- Mar 11, 2022
It looks like it should work and, indeed, a similar formula with REDUCE does work. Unfortunately SCAN produces an array on each row, leading to an array of arrays which hasn't been implemented within the calc engine. There are two distinct approaches to overcome the problem, neither of which is that attractive.
The first is to allow SCAN to run through the 6 values as a single sequence but to reset the resulting text to null whenever the scan returns to the first column. Rather than scanning the text array, I scanned the sequence {0,1,2;3,4,5} which can both be used to look up the text to concatenate and to identify the leading column.
= SCAN("", SEQUENCE(2,3,0), LAMBDA(str,k, LET( row, 1+QUOTIENT(k,3), column, 1+MOD(k,3), chr, INDEX(data, row, column), IF(column>1,str,"")&chr ) ) )
The second approach follows your original formula more closely but, instead of allowing SCAN to build a text array, it builds a Thunk that contains the array. BYROW then creates an array of 2 thunks and if the result is passed to MAKEARRAY each thunk may be singled out by INDEX, then expanded by passing it a null parameter string and wrapped within a further INDEX, which will return a single value to be assembled into the solution array.
Thunkλ = LAMBDA(x,LAMBDA(x)) Forming a thunk: = LET( arrayϑ, Thunkλ(array), Returning its content: = arrayϑ()
I will leave it to you to judge whether the most appropriate answer to your question is 'yes' or 'no'!
Following the announcement of the new array functions, I wondered if VSTACK or some other function could be put to use in this type of situation to extend BYROW?
In the absence of a built-in function, maybe define instead:
BYROWS
=LAMBDA(array,function,
REDUCE(1,
SEQUENCE(ROWS(array)),
LAMBDA(A,i,
IF(SEQUENCE(i)=i,
function(INDEX(array,i,)),
A))))
which could be used in conjunction with SCAN as shown...
(Out of interest I did rough timings of the various implementations on a 100x100 array)
My first attempt
reduceV=
LAMBDA(array,
DROP(
REDUCE(
"",
SEQUENCE(ROWS(array)),
LAMBDA(a, n,
VSTACK(
a,
SCAN(, CHOOSEROWS(array, n),
LAMBDA(acc, v, acc & v))
)
)
),
1
)
);
which gives
Not sure how to integrate it with timer.
- lori_mMar 24, 2022Steel Contributor
Great - looks better. and likely faster too. For timing maybe replace "" by 0 (or 1) and '&' with '+' then update function name in timer formula. From the times, it looks like your system is running twice as fast! I needed to reduce to n=50 to make it responsive enough on my setup.
- SergeiBaklanMar 24, 2022MVP
- lori_mMar 25, 2022Steel Contributor
Yup looks pretty fast! In any case, native byrow/bycol extended functions would get my vote to bypass the nested array error in general, as suggested in the original post. Then other methods - including thunks - could benefit from being able to process arrays of results more efficiently.