Removing duplicate elements from an array in Swift

Question

I might have an array that looks like the following:

[1, 4, 2, 2, 6, 24, 15, 2, 60, 15, 6]

Or, reall

Answer 1

Here's a category on SequenceType which preserves the original order of the array, but uses a Set to do the contains lookups to avoid the O(n) cost on Array's contains(_:) method.

public extension Sequence where Element: Hashable {

    /// Return the sequence with all duplicates removed.
    ///
    /// i.e. `[ 1, 2, 3, 1, 2 ].uniqued() == [ 1, 2, 3 ]`
    ///
    /// - note: Taken from stackoverflow.com/a/46354989/3141234, as 
    ///         per @Alexander's comment.
    func uniqued() -> [Element] {
        var seen = Set()
        return self.filter { seen.insert($0).inserted }
    }
}

If you aren't Hashable or Equatable, you can pass in a predicate to do the equality check:

extension Sequence {

    /// Return the sequence with all duplicates removed.
    ///
    /// Duplicate, in this case, is defined as returning `true` from `comparator`.
    ///
    /// - note: Taken from stackoverflow.com/a/46354989/3141234
    func uniqued(comparator: @escaping (Element, Element) throws -> Bool) rethrows -> [Element] {
        var buffer: [Element] = []

        for element in self {
            // If element is already in buffer, skip to the next element
            if try buffer.contains(where: { try comparator(element, $0) }) {
                continue
            }

            buffer.append(element)
        }

        return buffer
    }
}

Now, if you don't have Hashable, but are Equatable, you can use this method:

extension Sequence where Element: Equatable {

    /// Return the sequence with all duplicates removed.
    ///
    /// i.e. `[ 1, 2, 3, 1, 2 ].uniqued() == [ 1, 2, 3 ]`
    ///
    /// - note: Taken from stackoverflow.com/a/46354989/3141234
    func uniqued() -> [Element] {
        return self.uniqued(comparator: ==)
    }
}

Finally, you can add a key path version of uniqued like this:

extension Sequence {

    /// Returns the sequence with duplicate elements removed, performing the comparison usinig the property at
    /// the supplied keypath.
    ///
    /// i.e.
    ///
    /// ```
    /// [
    ///   MyStruct(value: "Hello"),
    ///   MyStruct(value: "Hello"),
    ///   MyStruct(value: "World")
    ///  ].uniqued(\.value)
    /// ```
    /// would result in
    ///
    /// ```
    /// [
    ///   MyStruct(value: "Hello"),
    ///   MyStruct(value: "World")
    /// ]
    /// ```
    ///
    /// - note: Taken from stackoverflow.com/a/46354989/3141234
    ///
    func uniqued(_ keyPath: KeyPath) -> [Element] {
        self.uniqued { $0[keyPath: keyPath] == $1[keyPath: keyPath] }
    }
}

You can stick both of these into your app, Swift will choose the right one depending on your sequence's Iterator.Element type.