How to use Swapper in Golang?

Swapper is a function defined in the reflect package. This function takes a slice and returns a swap function. This swap function takes 2 indexes as arguments and swaps the values at index position in the slice.

Originally published on schadokar.dev

Function Definition

func Swapper(slice interface{}) func(i, j int)

Let's try

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "reflect"
)

func main() {
    s := []int{1, 2, 3}
    fmt.Printf("Before swap: %v\n", s)

    swapF := reflect.Swapper(s)

    swapF(0, 1)

    fmt.Printf("After 1 swap: %v\n", s)

    swapF(0, 2)

    fmt.Printf("After 2 swap: %v\n", s)
}

Try it

Output

Before swap: [1 2 3]
After 1 swap: [2 1 3]
After 2 swap: [3 1 2]

Swapper panics if the provided interface is not a slice.

panic: reflect: call of Swapper on <Type> Value

Reverse a slice using Swapper

Swap first element with last element, the second element with second last and so on.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "reflect"
)

func main() {
    s := []int{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}

    fmt.Printf("Before swap: %v\n", s)

    swapF := reflect.Swapper(s)

    for i := 0; i < len(s)/2; i++ {
        swapF(i, len(s)-1-i)
    }

    fmt.Printf("After swap: %v\n", s)
}

Try it

Output

Before swap: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7]
After swap: [7 6 5 4 3 2 1]

Use Swapper in Bubble sort

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "reflect"
)

func main() {
    s := []int{1, 2, 6, 3, 8, 0, 7, 9, 5, 4}

    fmt.Printf("Before swapper: %v\n", s)

    swapF := reflect.Swapper(s)

    for i := 0; i < len(s)-1; i++ {
        for j := i + 1; j < len(s); j++ {
            if s[i] > s[j] {
                swapF(i, j)
            }
        }
    }

    fmt.Printf("After swapper: %v\n", s)
}

Output

Before swapper: [1 2 6 3 8 0 7 9 5 4]
After swapper: [0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9]

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