Clojure: name function

The 'name' function is a clojure function that returns the string for a keyword, symbol, or string.

name - function

Usage: (name x)

Returns the name String of a string, symbol or keyword.

At first glace this might not seem that interesting; however, it's good to know 'name' if you've ever been surprised by (str :foo) => ":foo". If you have a ruby background (as I do), you probably expected the result to be "foo", spent a bit of time looking, and found that (name :foo) was actually what you were looking for.


That's helpful, but not particularly exciting. Perhaps a more interesting application of name is the ability to normalize all keys as strings and destructure. For example, say you're designing a library that monitors threads and you want to be able to pass in warning and error thresholds. Usage of your functions may look like the following examples
(monitored-threads/create :warn-threshold 100 :error-threshold 200)
(monitored-threads/create "warn-threshold" 100 "error-threshold" 200)

Assuming a simple function that updates keys:
(defn update-keys [m f]
(reduce (fn [r [k v]] (assoc r (f k) v)) {} m))
You can now write your create function as:
(defn create [& {:as m}]
(let [{:strs [warn-threshold error-threshold]} (update-keys m name)]
; do work, son
))

© Jay Fields - www.jayfields.com