Scala pattern matching

Scala has very useful, built-in pattern matching. Pattern matching can be used to test for exact and/or partial matches of entire values, parts of objects, and so on; you name it!

We can use this sample script for reference:

def matchTest(x: Any): Any = x match {
  case 7 => "seven"
  case "two" => 2
  case _ => "something"
}
val isItTwo = matchTest("two")
val isItTest = matchTest("test")
val isItSeven = matchTest(7)

We define a function called matchTest. It takes any kind of argument and can return any type of result (not sure if that is real-life programming!).

The keyword of interest is match. This means the function will walk down the list of choices until it gets a match on the value x passed and then returns it.

As you can see, we have numbers and strings as input and output.

The last case statement is a wildcard, catchall-if the code gets that far, it will match any argument.

We can see the output here: