Scala : collectFirst example

On occasion, you want to find the first occurrence of an item in a list, then transform it to another type. Using partial functions with collectFirst, we can accomplish this.

collectFirst will first call isDefinedAt to determine if apply should be called for the current item in the list. Thus it will skip over the non matching elements in the list without incurring a match exception.

trait Animal
case class Mammal(name: String) extends Animal
case class Bird(name: String) extends Animal

val animals = Seq(Mammal("elephant"), Mammal("tiger"), Bird("raven"), Mammal("monkey"), Bird("peacock"), Bird("sparrow"))


    val matchBird = new PartialFunction[Animal, Bird] {
      def apply(p: Animal) = {
        p match {
          case b@Bird(name) => b
        }
      }

      def isDefinedAt(p: Animal) = {
          p match {
            case Bird(name) => true
            case _ => false
          }
      }
    }


    animals collectFirst matchBird

    res11: Option[Bird] = Some(Bird(raven))