map(x => basename(x)) - Apply function to each value of an array

[illusional]

Hi, is there a way to apply a function to each value of an array. I'd like to get the basename (understanding there may potentially be name clashes) for each element in an array, and couldn't find a way to do this.

Other use cases, getting a bunch of strings from an array of files, eventually finding the max file-size of an array of files and more I'm sure.

If there's not a way, I think it might be something valuable you can do with some ideas:

• Javascript-ish array.map(el => my_function(el)) or `map_elements(iterable, el => my_function(el))
• Python-ish [my_function(el) for el in iterable]

[DavyCats]

There was quite a bit of discussion on such things in #312. The general consensus seemed to be that such things are best left out of the WDL syntax. Adding such features would bring WDL closer to becoming a full-blown programming language, which will reduce the ease of cooperation in the development of workflows, understanding the code written by others and learning how to write WDL. Though such a syntax might be easily understood by many programmers, WDL was intended to be intelligible and easy to learn for non-programmers as well, to whom this would likely look like magic.

Functionality like this can be achieved through the use of a task, in which you could write some (heredoc) python code. I haven't tested this but something like the following, in combination with the read_lines function, might work:

for x in ["~{sep='","' input_array}"]:
    print(do_something(x))

[jtratner]

If you're just getting basename, why not this?

scatter(x in arr) {
   String names = basename(x)
}
call mytask (input: names=names}

and then names outside of scatter are an array of strings.

[illusional]

I realised this is just a duplicate of #203, closing this.