I have a question about tuples and lists in Haskell. I know how to add input into a tuple a specific number of times. Now I want to add tuples into a list an unknown number of times; it's up to the user to decide how many tuples they want to add.
How do I add tuples into a list x number of times when I don't know X beforehand?
There's a lot of things you could possibly mean. For example, if you want a few copies of a single value, you can use replicate, defined in the Prelude:
replicate :: Int -> a -> [a]
replicate 0 x = []
replicate n | n < 0 = undefined
| otherwise = x : replicate (n-1) x
In ghci:
Prelude> replicate 4 ("Haskell", 2)
[("Haskell",2),("Haskell",2),("Haskell",2),("Haskell",2)]
Alternately, perhaps you actually want to do some IO to determine the list. Then a simple loop will do:
getListFromUser = do
putStrLn "keep going?"
s <- getLine
case s of
'y':_ -> do
putStrLn "enter a value"
v <- readLn
vs <- getListFromUser
return (v:vs)
_ -> return []
In ghci:
*Main> getListFromUser :: IO [(String, Int)]
keep going?
y
enter a value
("Haskell",2)
keep going?
y
enter a value
("Prolog",4)
keep going?
n
[("Haskell",2),("Prolog",4)]
Of course, this is a particularly crappy user interface -- I'm sure you can come up with a dozen ways to improve it! But the pattern, at least, should shine through: you can use values like [] and functions like : to construct lists. There are many, many other higher-level functions for constructing and manipulating lists, as well.
P.S. There's nothing particularly special about lists of tuples (as compared to lists of other things); the above functions display that by never mentioning them. =)
Sorry, you can't1. There are fundamental differences between tuples and lists:
A tuple always have a finite amount of elements, that is known at compile time. Tuples with different amounts of elements are actually different types.
List an have as many elements as they want. The amount of elements in a list doesn't need to be known at compile time.
A tuple can have elements of arbitrary types. Since the way you can use tuples always ensures that there is no type mismatch, this is safe.
On the other hand, all elements of a list have to have the same type. Haskell is a statically-typed language; that basically means that all types are known at compile time.
Because of these reasons, you can't. If it's not known, how many elements will fit into the tuple, you can't give it a type.
I guess that the input you get from your user is actually a string like "(1,2,3)". Try to make this directly a list, whithout making it a tuple before. You can use pattern matching for this, but here is a slightly sneaky approach. I just remove the opening and closing paranthesis from the string and replace them with brackets -- and voila it becomes a list.
tuplishToList :: String -> [Int]
tuplishToList str = read ('[' : tail (init str) ++ "]")
Edit
Sorry, I did not see your latest comment. What you try to do is not that difficult. I use these simple functions for my task:
words str splits str into a list of words that where separated by whitespace before. The output is a list of Strings. Caution: This only works if the string inside your tuple contains no whitespace. Implementing a better solution is left as an excercise to the reader.
map f lst applies f to each element of lst
read is a magic function that makes a a data type from a String. It only works if you know before, what the output is supposed to be. If you really want to understand how that works, consider implementing read for your specific usecase.
And here you go:
tuplish2List :: String -> [(String,Int)]
tuplish2List str = map read (words str)
1 As some others may point out, it may be possible using templates and other hacks, but I don't consider that a real solution.
When doing functional programming, it is often better to think about composition of operations instead of individual steps. So instead of thinking about it like adding tuples one at a time to a list, we can approach it by first dividing the input into a list of strings, and then converting each string into a tuple.
Assuming the tuples are written each on one line, we can split the input using lines, and then use read to parse each tuple. To make it work on the entire list, we use map.
main = do input <- getContents
let tuples = map read (lines input) :: [(String, Integer)]
print tuples
Let's try it.
$ runghc Tuples.hs
("Hello", 2)
("Haskell", 4)
Here, I press Ctrl+D to send EOF to the program, (or Ctrl+Z on Windows) and it prints the result.
[("Hello",2),("Haskell",4)]
If you want something more interactive, you will probably have to do your own recursion. See Daniel Wagner's answer for an example of that.
One simple solution to this would be to use a list comprehension, as so (done in GHCi):
Prelude> let fstMap tuplist = [fst x | x <- tuplist]
Prelude> fstMap [("String1",1),("String2",2),("String3",3)]
["String1","String2","String3"]
Prelude> :t fstMap
fstMap :: [(t, b)] -> [t]
This will work for an arbitrary number of tuples - as many as the user wants to use.
To use this in your code, you would just write:
fstMap :: Eq a => [(a,b)] -> [a]
fstMap tuplist = [fst x | x <- tuplist]
The example I gave is just one possible solution. As the name implies, of course, you can just write:
fstMap' :: Eq a => [(a,b)] -> [a]
fstMap' = map fst
This is an even simpler solution.
I'm guessing that, since this is for a class, and you've been studying Haskell for < 1 week, you don't actually need to do any input/output. That's a bit more advanced than you probably are, yet. So:
As others have said, map fst will take a list of tuples, of arbitrary length, and return the first elements. You say you know how to do that. Fine.
But how do the tuples get into the list in the first place? Well, if you have a list of tuples and want to add another, (:) does the trick. Like so:
oldList = [("first", 1), ("second", 2)]
newList = ("third", 2) : oldList
You can do that as many times as you like. And if you don't have a list of tuples yet, your list is [].
Does that do everything that you need? If not, what specifically is it missing?
Edit: With the corrected type:
Eq a => [(a, b)]
That's not the type of a function. It's the type of a list of tuples. Just have the user type yourFunctionName followed by [ ("String1", val1), ("String2", val2), ... ("LastString", lastVal)] at the prompt.
Related
I'm trying to learn OCaml since I'm new to the language and I stumbled across this problem where I can't seem to find a way to see, in a function where I need to merge 2 kinds of these lists, if there is already an element with a key, and if so how to join the elements that come after. Would appreciate any guidance.
For example if I have:
l1: [(k, [e]); (ka, [])]
l2: [(k, [f; g])]
How can I end up with:
fl: [(k, [e; f; g]); (ka, [])]
Basically, how can I filter the key k from both lists while making their elements combine.
There are functions in the standard OCaml library for dealing with lists of pairs where the first element of each pair is a key. You will find them described here: https://ocaml.org/releases/4.12/api/List.html under Association lists.
I will repeat what #ivg says. This is not how you want to solve your problem if you have more than just a few pairs to work with.
First of all, using lists as mappings is a bad idea. It is much better to use dedicated data structures such as maps and hash tables.
Answering your question directly, you can concatenate two lists using the (#) operator, e.g.,
# [1;2;3] # [4;5;6];;
- : int list = [1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6]
If you don't want repetitive elements when you merge then, and I feel like I repeat myself, it is bad to use lists for sets, it is better to use dedicated data structures such as sets and hash sets. But if you want to continue, then you can merge two lists without repetitions by checking if an element is already in the list before prepending to it. Easy to implement but hard to run, in a sense that it takes quadratic time to merge two lists this way.
If you still want to stick with the list of pairs, then you will find that the List.assoc function is useful, as it finds a value by key. The overall algorithm would be, given two lists, xs and ys, fold over elements of ys using xs as the initial value acc, and for each (ky,y) in ys if ky is already in acc, find the associated with ky value x and remove (List.remove_assoc) it, then merge x and y and prepend the merged value with the acc list, otherwise (if it is not in acc) just prepend (ky,y) to acc`. Note that this algorithm doesn't preserve order, so if it matters you need something more complex. Also, if your keys are sorted you can make it a little bit more efficient and easier to implement.
I guess you're doing this to practice with list.
What I would do is store the already found keys in an accumulator
let mergePairs yourList =
let rec aux accKeys = function
| [] -> []
| x :: xs -> let k,v = x in if (* k in accKeys *) then aux accKeys xs (*we suppress already
existing keys*)
else (k, v # (* get all the list of the other pairs with key = k in xs*))
:: aux (k::accKeys) xs
in aux [] yourList;;
I am currently trying to filter a list , that consist of tuples of the form (String , Double), for a List that consists of Strings. If the tuple doesn't contain a String of the second list, it should be removed from the list of tuples. So far I came up with this:
test :: [ExamScore] -> String -> [ExamScore]
test a b = filter ((== b).fst) a
My current problem is to replace the String that is filtered for by a list of Strings. Thanks for your help! Please go easy on me, I'm a first year informatics student that hasn't coded anytime before.
It's almost the same, just another filter function using elem:
test a b :: [ExamScore] -> [String] -> [ExamScore]
test a b = filter (\(s, _) -> elem s b) a
Or, if you're more into the composition style:
test a b = filter (flip elem b . fst) a
(It's worth noting that it's not the most efficient way, since elem is O(N) for lists, so depending on your case you may want to find a better structure for storing the keys.)
I am trying to understand this piece of code which returns the all possible combinations of [a] passed to it:
-- Infinite list of all combinations for a given value domain
allCombinations :: [a] -> [[a]]
allCombinations [] = [[]]
allCombinations values = [] : concatMap (\w -> map (:w) values)
(allCombinations values)
Here i tried this sample input:
ghci> take 7 (allCombinations [True,False])
[[],[True],[False],[True,True],[False,True],[True,False],[False,False]]
Here it doesn't seems understandable to me which is that how the recursion will eventually stops and will return [ [ ] ], because allCombinations function certainly doesn't have any pointer which moves through the list, on each call and when it meets the base case [ ] it returns [ [ ] ]. According to me It will call allCombinations function infinite and will never stop on its own. Or may be i am missing something?
On the other hand, take only returns the first 7 elements from the final list after all calculation is carried out by going back after completing recursive calls. So actually how recursion met the base case here?
Secondly what is the purpose of concatMap here, here we could also use Map function here just to apply function to the list and inside function we could arrange the list? What is actually concatMap doing here. From definition it concatMap tells us it first map the function then concatenate the lists where as i see we are already doing that inside the function here?
Any valuable input would be appreciated?
Short answer: it will never meet the base case.
However, it does not need to. The base case is most often needed to stop a recursion, however here you want to return an infinite list, so no need to stop it.
On the other hand, this function would break if you try to take more than 1 element of allCombination [] -- have a look at #robin's answer to understand better why. That is the only reason you see a base case here.
The way the main function works is that it starts with an empty list, and then append at the beginning each element in the argument list. (:w) does that recursively. However, this lambda alone would return an infinitely nested list. I.e: [],[[True],[False]],[[[True,True],[True,False] etc. Concatmap removes the outer list at each step, and as it is called recursively this only returns one list of lists at the end. This can be a complicated concept to grasp so look for other example of the use of concatMap and try to understand how they work and why map alone wouldn't be enough.
This obviously only works because of Haskell lazy evaluation. Similarly, you know in a foldr you need to pass it the base case, however when your function is supposed to only take infinite lists, you can have undefined as the base case to make it more clear that finite lists should not be used. For example, foldr f undefined could be used instead of foldr f []
#Lorenzo has already explained the key point - that the recursion in fact never ends, and therefore this generates an infinite list, which you can still take any finite number of elements from because of Haskell's laziness. But I think it will be helpful to give a bit more detail about this particular function and how it works.
Firstly, the [] : at the start of the definition tells you that the first element will always be []. That of course is the one and only way to make a 0-element list from elements of values. The rest of the list is concatMap (\w -> map (:w) values) (allCombinations values).
concatMap f is as you observe simply the composition concat . (map f): it applies the given function to every element of the list, and concatenates the results together. Here the function (\w -> map (:w) values) takes a list, and produces the list of lists given by prepending each element of values to that list. For example, if values == [1,2], then:
(\w -> map (:w) values) [1,2] == [[1,1,2], [2,1,2]]
if we map that function over a list of lists, such as
[[], [1], [2]]
then we get (still with values as [1,2]):
[[[1], [2]], [[1,1], [2,1]], [[1,2], [2,2]]]
That is of course a list of lists of lists - but then the concat part of concatMap comes to our rescue, flattening the outermost layer, and resulting in a list of lists as follows:
[[1], [2], [1,1], [2,1], [1,2], [2,2]]
One thing that I hope you might have noticed about this is that the list of lists I started with was not arbitrary. [[], [1], [2]] is the list of all combinations of size 0 or 1 from the starting list [1,2]. This is in fact the first three elements of allCombinations [1,2].
Recall that all we know "for sure" when looking at the definition is that the first element of this list will be []. And the rest of the list is concatMap (\w -> map (:w) [1,2]) (allCombinations [1,2]). The next step is to expand the recursive part of this as [] : concatMap (\w -> map (:w) [1,2]) (allCombinations [1,2]). The outer concatMap
then can see that the head of the list it's mapping over is [] - producing a list starting [1], [2] and continuing with the results of appending 1 and then 2 to the other elements - whatever they are. But we've just seen that the next 2 elements are in fact [1] and [2]. We end up with
allCombinations [1,2] == [] : [1] : [2] : concatMap (\w -> map (:w) values) [1,2] (tail (allCombinations [1,2]))
(tail isn't strictly called in the evaluation process, it's done by pattern-matching instead - I'm trying to explain more by words than explicit plodding through equalities).
And looking at that we know the tail is [1] : [2] : concatMap .... The key point is that, at each stage of the process, we know for sure what the first few elements of the list are - and they happen to be all 0-element lists with values taken from values, followed by all 1-element lists with these values, then all 2-element lists, and so on. Once you've got started, the process must continue, because the function passed to concatMap ensures that we just get the lists obtained from taking every list generated so far, and appending each element of values to the front of them.
If you're still confused by this, look up how to compute the Fibonacci numbers in Haskell. The classic way to get an infinite list of all Fibonacci numbers is:
fib = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fib (tail fib)
This is a bit easier to understand that the allCombinations example, but relies on essentially the same thing - defining a list purely in terms of itself, but using lazy evaluation to progressively generate as much of the list as you want, according to a simple rule.
It is not a base case but a special case, and this is not recursion but corecursion,(*) which never stops.
Maybe the following re-formulation will be easier to follow:
allCombs :: [t] -> [[t]]
-- [1,2] -> [[]] ++ [1:[],2:[]] ++ [1:[1],2:[1],1:[2],2:[2]] ++ ...
allCombs vals = concat . iterate (cons vals) $ [[]]
where
cons :: [t] -> [[t]] -> [[t]]
cons vals combs = concat [ [v : comb | v <- vals]
| comb <- combs ]
-- iterate :: (a -> a ) -> a -> [a]
-- cons vals :: [[t]] -> [[t]]
-- iterate (cons vals) :: [[t]] -> [[[t]]]
-- concat :: [[ a ]] -> [ a ]
-- concat . iterate (cons vals) :: [[t]]
Looks different, does the same thing. Not just produces the same results, but actually is doing the same thing to produce them.(*) The concat is the same concat, you just need to tilt your head a little to see it.
This also shows why the concat is needed here. Each step = cons vals is producing a new batch of combinations, with length increasing by 1 on each step application, and concat glues them all together into one list of results.
The length of each batch is the previous batch length multiplied by n where n is the length of vals. This also shows the need to special case the vals == [] case i.e. the n == 0 case: 0*x == 0 and so the length of each new batch is 0 and so an attempt to get one more value from the results would never produce a result, i.e. enter an infinite loop. The function is said to become non-productive, at that point.
Incidentally, cons is almost the same as
== concat [ [v : comb | comb <- combs]
| v <- vals ]
== liftA2 (:) vals combs
liftA2 :: Applicative f => (a -> b -> r) -> f a -> f b -> f r
So if the internal order of each step results is unimportant to you (but see an important caveat at the post bottom) this can just be coded as
allCombsA :: [t] -> [[t]]
-- [1,2] -> [[]] ++ [1:[],2:[]] ++ [1:[1],1:[2],2:[1],2:[2]] ++ ...
allCombsA [] = [[]]
allCombsA vals = concat . iterate (liftA2 (:) vals) $ [[]]
(*) well actually, this refers to a bit modified version of it,
allCombsRes vals = res
where res = [] : concatMap (\w -> map (: w) vals)
res
-- or:
allCombsRes vals = fix $ ([] :) . concatMap (\w -> map (: w) vals)
-- where
-- fix g = x where x = g x -- in Data.Function
Or in pseudocode:
Produce a sequence of values `res` by
FIRST producing `[]`, AND THEN
from each produced value `w` in `res`,
produce a batch of new values `[v : w | v <- vals]`
and splice them into the output sequence
(by using `concat`)
So the res list is produced corecursively, starting from its starting point, [], producing next elements of it based on previous one(s) -- either in batches, as in iterate-based version, or one-by-one as here, taking the input via a back pointer into the results previously produced (taking its output as its input, as a saying goes -- which is a bit deceptive of course, as we take it at a slower pace than we're producing it, or otherwise the process would stop being productive, as was already mentioned above).
But. Sometimes it can be advantageous to produce the input via recursive calls, creating at run time a sequence of functions, each passing its output up the chain, to its caller. Still, the dataflow is upwards, unlike regular recursion which first goes downward towards the base case.
The advantage just mentioned has to do with memory retention. The corecursive allCombsRes as if keeps a back-pointer into the sequence that it itself is producing, and so the sequence can not be garbage-collected on the fly.
But the chain of the stream-producers implicitly created by your original version at run time means each of them can be garbage-collected on the fly as n = length vals new elements are produced from each downstream element, so the overall process becomes equivalent to just k = ceiling $ logBase n i nested loops each with O(1) space state, to produce the ith element of the sequence.
This is much much better than the O(n) memory requirement of the corecursive/value-recursive allCombsRes which in effect keeps a back pointer into its output at the i/n position. And in practice a logarithmic space requirement is most likely to be seen as a more or less O(1) space requirement.
This advantage only happens with the order of generation as in your version, i.e. as in cons vals, not liftA2 (:) vals which has to go back to the start of its input sequence combs (for each new v in vals) which thus must be preserved, so we can safely say that the formulation in your question is rather ingenious.
And if we're after a pointfree re-formulation -- as pointfree can at times be illuminating -- it is
allCombsY values = _Y $ ([] :) . concatMap (\w -> map (: w) values)
where
_Y g = g (_Y g) -- no-sharing fixpoint combinator
So the code is much easier understood in a fix-using formulation, and then we just switch fix with the semantically equivalent _Y, for efficiency, getting the (equivalent of the) original code from the question.
The above claims about space requirements behavior are easily tested. I haven't done so, yet.
See also:
Why does GHC make fix so confounding?
Sharing vs. non-sharing fixed-point combinator
Is there an operation on lists in library that makes groups of n elements? For example: n=3
groupInto 3 [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
If not, how do I do it?
A quick search on Hoogle showed that there is no such function. On the other hand, it was replied that there is one in the split package, called chunksOf.
However, you can do it on your own
group :: Int -> [a] -> [[a]]
group _ [] = []
group n l
| n > 0 = (take n l) : (group n (drop n l))
| otherwise = error "Negative or zero n"
Of course, some parentheses can be removed, I left there here for understanding what the code does:
The base case is simple: whenever the list is empty, simply return the empty list.
The recursive case tests first if n is positive. If n is 0 or lower we would enter an infinite loop and we don't want that. Then we split the list into two parts using take and drop: take gives back the first n elements while drop returns the other ones. Then, we add the first n elements to the list obtained by applying our function to the other elements in the original list.
This function, among other similar ones, can be found in the popular split package.
> import Data.List.Split
> chunksOf 3 [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
[[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
You can write one yourself, as Mihai pointed out. But I would use the splitAt function since it doesn't require two passes on the input list like the take-drop combination does:
chunks :: Int -> [a] -> [[a]]
chunks _ [] = []
chunks n xs =
let (ys, zs) = splitAt n xs
in ys : chunks n zs
This is a common pattern - generating a list from a seed value (which in this case is your input list) by repeated iteration. This pattern is captured in the unfoldr function. We can use it with a slightly modified version of splitAt (thanks Will Ness for the more concise version):
chunks n = takeWhile (not . null) . unfoldr (Just . splitAt n)
That is, using unfoldr we generate chunks of n elements while at the same time we shorten the input list by n elements, and we generate these chunks until we get the empty list -- at this point the initial input is completely consumed.
Of course, as the others have pointed out, you should use the already existing function from the split module. But it's always good to accustom yourself with the list processing functions in the standard Haskell libraries.
This is ofte called "chunk" and is one of the most frequently mentioned list operations that is not in base. The package split provides such an operation though, copy and pasting the haddock documentation:
> chunksOf 3 ['a'..'z']
["abc","def","ghi","jkl","mno","pqr","stu","vwx","yz"]
Additionally, against my wishes, hoogle only searches a small set of libraries (those provided with GHC or perhaps HP), but you can explicitly add packages to the search using +PKG_NAME - hoogle with Int -> [a] -> [[a]] +split gets what you want. Some people use Hayoo for this reason.
I have a question about tuples and lists in Haskell. I know how to add input into a tuple a specific number of times. Now I want to add tuples into a list an unknown number of times; it's up to the user to decide how many tuples they want to add.
How do I add tuples into a list x number of times when I don't know X beforehand?
There's a lot of things you could possibly mean. For example, if you want a few copies of a single value, you can use replicate, defined in the Prelude:
replicate :: Int -> a -> [a]
replicate 0 x = []
replicate n | n < 0 = undefined
| otherwise = x : replicate (n-1) x
In ghci:
Prelude> replicate 4 ("Haskell", 2)
[("Haskell",2),("Haskell",2),("Haskell",2),("Haskell",2)]
Alternately, perhaps you actually want to do some IO to determine the list. Then a simple loop will do:
getListFromUser = do
putStrLn "keep going?"
s <- getLine
case s of
'y':_ -> do
putStrLn "enter a value"
v <- readLn
vs <- getListFromUser
return (v:vs)
_ -> return []
In ghci:
*Main> getListFromUser :: IO [(String, Int)]
keep going?
y
enter a value
("Haskell",2)
keep going?
y
enter a value
("Prolog",4)
keep going?
n
[("Haskell",2),("Prolog",4)]
Of course, this is a particularly crappy user interface -- I'm sure you can come up with a dozen ways to improve it! But the pattern, at least, should shine through: you can use values like [] and functions like : to construct lists. There are many, many other higher-level functions for constructing and manipulating lists, as well.
P.S. There's nothing particularly special about lists of tuples (as compared to lists of other things); the above functions display that by never mentioning them. =)
Sorry, you can't1. There are fundamental differences between tuples and lists:
A tuple always have a finite amount of elements, that is known at compile time. Tuples with different amounts of elements are actually different types.
List an have as many elements as they want. The amount of elements in a list doesn't need to be known at compile time.
A tuple can have elements of arbitrary types. Since the way you can use tuples always ensures that there is no type mismatch, this is safe.
On the other hand, all elements of a list have to have the same type. Haskell is a statically-typed language; that basically means that all types are known at compile time.
Because of these reasons, you can't. If it's not known, how many elements will fit into the tuple, you can't give it a type.
I guess that the input you get from your user is actually a string like "(1,2,3)". Try to make this directly a list, whithout making it a tuple before. You can use pattern matching for this, but here is a slightly sneaky approach. I just remove the opening and closing paranthesis from the string and replace them with brackets -- and voila it becomes a list.
tuplishToList :: String -> [Int]
tuplishToList str = read ('[' : tail (init str) ++ "]")
Edit
Sorry, I did not see your latest comment. What you try to do is not that difficult. I use these simple functions for my task:
words str splits str into a list of words that where separated by whitespace before. The output is a list of Strings. Caution: This only works if the string inside your tuple contains no whitespace. Implementing a better solution is left as an excercise to the reader.
map f lst applies f to each element of lst
read is a magic function that makes a a data type from a String. It only works if you know before, what the output is supposed to be. If you really want to understand how that works, consider implementing read for your specific usecase.
And here you go:
tuplish2List :: String -> [(String,Int)]
tuplish2List str = map read (words str)
1 As some others may point out, it may be possible using templates and other hacks, but I don't consider that a real solution.
When doing functional programming, it is often better to think about composition of operations instead of individual steps. So instead of thinking about it like adding tuples one at a time to a list, we can approach it by first dividing the input into a list of strings, and then converting each string into a tuple.
Assuming the tuples are written each on one line, we can split the input using lines, and then use read to parse each tuple. To make it work on the entire list, we use map.
main = do input <- getContents
let tuples = map read (lines input) :: [(String, Integer)]
print tuples
Let's try it.
$ runghc Tuples.hs
("Hello", 2)
("Haskell", 4)
Here, I press Ctrl+D to send EOF to the program, (or Ctrl+Z on Windows) and it prints the result.
[("Hello",2),("Haskell",4)]
If you want something more interactive, you will probably have to do your own recursion. See Daniel Wagner's answer for an example of that.
One simple solution to this would be to use a list comprehension, as so (done in GHCi):
Prelude> let fstMap tuplist = [fst x | x <- tuplist]
Prelude> fstMap [("String1",1),("String2",2),("String3",3)]
["String1","String2","String3"]
Prelude> :t fstMap
fstMap :: [(t, b)] -> [t]
This will work for an arbitrary number of tuples - as many as the user wants to use.
To use this in your code, you would just write:
fstMap :: Eq a => [(a,b)] -> [a]
fstMap tuplist = [fst x | x <- tuplist]
The example I gave is just one possible solution. As the name implies, of course, you can just write:
fstMap' :: Eq a => [(a,b)] -> [a]
fstMap' = map fst
This is an even simpler solution.
I'm guessing that, since this is for a class, and you've been studying Haskell for < 1 week, you don't actually need to do any input/output. That's a bit more advanced than you probably are, yet. So:
As others have said, map fst will take a list of tuples, of arbitrary length, and return the first elements. You say you know how to do that. Fine.
But how do the tuples get into the list in the first place? Well, if you have a list of tuples and want to add another, (:) does the trick. Like so:
oldList = [("first", 1), ("second", 2)]
newList = ("third", 2) : oldList
You can do that as many times as you like. And if you don't have a list of tuples yet, your list is [].
Does that do everything that you need? If not, what specifically is it missing?
Edit: With the corrected type:
Eq a => [(a, b)]
That's not the type of a function. It's the type of a list of tuples. Just have the user type yourFunctionName followed by [ ("String1", val1), ("String2", val2), ... ("LastString", lastVal)] at the prompt.