this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Programming Challenges

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Welcome to the programming.dev challenge community!

Three challenges will be posted every week to complete

Easy challenges will give 1 point, medium will give 2, and hard will give 3. If you have the fastest time or use the least amount of characters you will get a bonus point (in ties everyone gets the bonus point)

Exact duplicate solutions are not allowed and will not give you any points. Submissions on a challenge will be open for a week.

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[Medium] String Decompression Solutions Counter (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Given a compressed string, give the number of ways it can be decompressed.

  • A compressed string is a string where substrings of repeated characters are changed to a format similar to aaa -> a3
  • For example for the string aaabbhhhh33aaa the compressed string would be a3b2h432a3

As an example of counting decompressing options. Say you have the input a333b2. This can be read as a333 b2 or a3 33 b2 so you would need to return the value 2 as there are 2 options.

You must accept the input as a command line argument (entered when your app is ran) and print out the result

(It will be called like node main.js aaaaa or however else to run apps in your language)

You can use the solution tester in this post to test you followed the correct format https://programming.dev/post/1805174

Checking through the solutions of last weeks problems should be happening ~~this weekend~~ monday + tuesday. Been getting too much work and theres a game jam thats been going on but should be able to go through them all then. I may do the easy one last since it cant be checked using the solutions tester so that one will take a bit longer.

Will also try to go through and give solutions to these ones as well on the weekend and will try to do solutions as soon as possible from now on so you can see if you failed the test cases. For the ones done last week, after I go through them all ill give 1 extra day from then on for any resubmissions

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks for the update on checking through solutions, and thanks in general for all the work you've put into this community!

Would just like to clarify: what are the valid decompressed strings? For an input of a333a3, should we return 2 (either a333 a3 or a3 33 a3) or 1 (since a333 a3 isn't a possible compression -- it would be a336 instead)? Do we have to handle cases like a00010, and if so, how?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The first one would give 2 since it doesnt validate what its supposed to have been when it was compressed

For a00010 that one would be a0 00 10 or a000 10 or a0 0010 or a00 010 or a00010 for 5 since it doesnt validate

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So every list of strings, where each string is some character followed by one or more digits, is a distinct, valid decompressing option. Thanks for clarifying!