RogerBW's Blog

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding acronyms and string similarity. (Note that this ends today.)

Task 1: Acronyms

You are given an array of words and a word.

Write a script to return true if concatenating the first letter of each word in the given array matches the given word, return false otherwise.

So basically I want to concatenate the first letter of each string in the array.

JavaScript:

function acronyms(a, b) {
    let os = "";
    for (let c of a) {
        os += c.charAt(0);
    }
    return os == b;
}

Task 2: Friendly Strings

You are given two strings.

Write a script to return true if swapping any two letters in one string match the other string, return false otherwise.

This isn't the full Levenshtein distance of challenge 96, so I just swap letters experimentally to see if I get a match. Perl:

sub friendlystrings($a, $b) {
  foreach my $i (0 ..  length($a) - 2) {
    foreach my $j ($i + 1 ..  length($a) - 1) {
      my $c = $a;
      substr($c, $i, 1) = substr($a, $j, 1);
      substr($c, $j, 1) = substr($a, $i, 1);
      if ($c eq $b) {
        return 1;
      }
    }
  }
  0;
}

(Python annoys because although it treats strings as arrays in most respects you apparently can't write to a position in a string using array notation.)

Full code on github.