RogerBW's Blog

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved transpositions. (Note that this is open until 2 May 2021.)

TASK #1 › Valid Phone Numbers

You are given a text file.

Write a script to display all valid phone numbers in the given text file.

Both of this week's challenges took the form of file input and output. This one was basically a regexp, derivable from the sample data, and is trivially done in shell:

egrep "^ *(\+[0-9]{2}|\([0-9]{2}\)|[0-9]{4}) [0-9]{10} *$"

Perl isn't much longer:

while (<>) {
  print if /^\s*(\+[0-9]{2}|\([0-9]{2}\)|[0-9]{4}) [0-9]{10}\s*$/;
}

Raku has its own special way of doing regexps:

for lines() {
  say $_ if /^\s*(\+<[0..9]> ** 2|\(<[0..9]> ** 2\)|<[0..9]> ** 4)\s<[0..9]> ** 10\s*$/;
}

and Python, Ruby and Rust all looked like variants of the Perl, with more or less clutter about reading standard input and writing to standard output. (I wrote a test harness too, which would feed the input file to the program of choice, then compare the output with the template. Which, as it turned out, was the same basic transposition code I'd need for part 2.)

TASK #2 › Transpose File

You are given a text file.

Write a script to transpose the contents of the given file.

(Where the input file is a simple CSV.)

This is really three separate tasks: read the input CSV, do the transposition, and write the output. If I were doing it in the real world, this would probably be three separate library functions, perhaps with a wrapper if the three-in-one task were done commonly.

For Perl of course I used the Text::CSV_XS module. (With some sugar to let the thing take either a command line parameter or stdin; for the others I didn't bother.)

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({eol => $/});

my $fh;
if (defined $ARGV[0] && -e $ARGV[0]) {
  open $fh,'<',$ARGV[0];
} else {
  $fh=*STDIN;
}

I can use autovivification to assign to arbitrary elements in arbitrary lists.

my @a;
my $ri=0;
while (my $row=$csv->getline($fh)) {
  foreach my $ci (0..$#{$row}) {
    $a[$ci][$ri]=$row->[$ci];
  }
  $ri++;
}

close $fh;

$csv->say(*STDOUT,$_) for @a;

The other languages don't have CSV handling built in and I try not to use external modules; for this situation, a simple split on commas was adequate. Raku:

my @a;
my $ri=0;

for lines() {
  my @r=split ',',$_;
  for 0..@r.elems-1 -> $ci {
    @a[$ci][$ri]=@r[$ci];
  }
  $ri++;
}

for @a -> @r {
  say join(',',@r);
}

Now we lose autovivification and have to have a bit more guard code. Python:

a=[]

for line in fileinput.input():
    line=line.rstrip()
    r=line.split(',')
    for ci in range(len(r)):
        while len(a) < ci+1:
            a.append([])
        a[ci].append(r[ci])

for r in a:
          print (','.join(r))

and Ruby and Rust work more or less the same way.

Full code on github.