How can I remove an item from a sequence in Clojure?

Question

First, I assume each structure-specific sequences would have different ways to remove an item: Vectors could be by index, List could be remove first or last, Set should be passing of the actual item to remove, etc.

Second, I assume there are some methods for removal that are structure agnostic; they work on seq interface.

Since sequences are immutable in Clojure, I suspect what you're actually doing is making a cheap copy of the original, only without the original item. This means list comprehension could be used for removal, but I suspect it would be unnecessarily verbose.

Please give some idiomatic examples of the different ways to remove items from Clojure sequences.

If anyone's looking how to remove only the last item: butlast is your go-to function. — solstinger

Brian Carper Brian Carper · Accepted Answer · 2009-06-02T18:19:52

There is no single interface for removing things from all of Clojure's data structure types, possibly because of the different performance characteristics.

(disj #{:foo :bar} :foo)       ; => #{:bar}
(dissoc {:foo 1 :bar 2} :foo)  ; => {:bar 2}
(pop [:bar :foo])              ; => [:bar]
(pop (list :foo :bar))         ; => (:bar)

These also work (returning a seq):

(remove #{:foo} #{:foo :bar})      ; => (:bar)
(remove #{:foo} [:foo :bar])       ; => (:bar)
(remove #{:foo} (list :foo :bar))  ; => (:bar)

This doesn't work for hash-maps because when you iterate over a map, you get key/value pairs. But this works:

(remove (fn [[k v]] (#{:foo} k)) {:foo 1 :bar 2})  ; => ([:bar 2])

How can I remove an item from a sequence in Clojure?

3 Answers