Some time ago I blogged about using CFGroovy to build a function to take two structures and merge their keys together selectively based on a regular expression. Today I revisit that to make a smarter function, and way more trim. The enhancement here is to allow the user to pass in an array of structures, allowing for merging of as many structures as the user needs. We also cleaned up the code a bit to be more Groovy!

def reMerge(structArray, regex) {
   def result = [:]
   def p = (regex instanceof java.util.regex.Pattern) ? regex : ~/${regex}/

   structArray.each { it.each { k, v -> if (p.matcher(k).matches()) result[k] = v } }
   result
}

def s1 = [ firstName: "Adam", companyName: "adampresley.com" ]
def s2 = [ age: 32 ]
def s3 = [ lastName: "Presley" ]

def list = [ s1, s2, s3 ]
def result = reMerge(list, ~/(?i).*name/)

result

Take that sample snippet and drop it in GroovyConsole and run it. As you can see it will give you a new structure with only the keys from the three source structures that have the word “name” in it. You may also notice the reMerge function can take the regular expression as a string or a Pattern object for convenience.

Groovy is fun! Happy coding!