Re: [QUIZ] Perl 'Easy' Quiz of the Week #2005-1 - Timing

22/01/2005 04:36:52, Daniel Martin 
<martin-+m399P62/adg9hUCZPvPmw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>IMPORTANT: Please do not post solutions, hints, or other spoilers
>        until at least 60 hours after the date of this message.
>        Thanks.
>
>IMPORTANT: S'il vous plaît, attendez au minimum 60 heures après la
>        date de ce message avant de poster solutions, indices ou autres
>        révélations. Merci.
>
>[Other translations omitted as I am not in a position to verify them.
>Besides, I always found it bizarre to include translations of the
>caveat without including translations of the quiz]
>
>This week's quiz was inspired by a problem seen at my day job (*)
>about a year ago that I was recently inspired to look at again.
>Without further ado:
>
>Your task is to transform an input file containing unique sorted lines
>matching the regular expression /^\w+\.[A-Z]$/.  For example, a
>typical input file might contain:
>
>ALDA.D
>ALDA.Q
>ALDA.W
>AMTA.B
>AMTA.E
>AMTA.M
>AMTA.X
>BMX.F
>C.X
>DMZ.A
>DMZ.X
>
>Note that the input can be grouped by what comes before the '.' - in
>the example, we have everything beginning with 'ALDA.', then
>everything beginning with 'AMTA.', etc.  Call the bit before the '.'
>the prefix, and the bit after the dot the suffix.
>
>Your job is to insert lines into the input so that for every unique
>prefix, there is one (and only one!) line with the suffix ".M".  For
>example, the input above would yield the output
>
>ALDA.D
>ALDA.M
>ALDA.Q
>ALDA.W
>AMTA.B
>AMTA.E
>AMTA.M
>AMTA.X
>BMX.F
>BMX.M
>C.M
>C.X
>DMZ.A
>DMZ.M
>DMZ.X
>
>Note that the output will have every line that was in the input, plus
>some extra .M lines (although note that AMTA.M was already present 
in
>the input).  Also, the output must consist only of sorted unique
>lines.
>
>Your program should take 2 arguments, an input filename and an 
output
>filename.  It would be convenient if your program also worked with
>fewer arguments, but I'm not going to make that part of the quiz.  (If
>you do decide to go the extra mile and also accept fewer arguments,
>with only one argument your program should use STDOUT as the 
output
>file, and with no arguments your program should behave as a filter -
>STDIN for input, STDOUT for output.)
>
>As an added challenge, the file may be entirely too big to fit into
>available memory.  Your program should still behave properly.  It is
>in fact possible to write a solution whose memory requirements are
>determined by the maximum length of an individual line, not the number
>of lines in the file.
>
>Be careful of the following edge cases:
>
>echo C.X > test_input_1
>perl ricfilter.pl test_input_1 test_output_1
># test output 1 should now contain two lines: C.M followed by C.X
>
>echo C.G > test_input_2
>perl ricfilter.pl test_input_2 test_output_2
># test output 2 should now contain two lines: C.G followed by C.M
>
>cat /dev/null > test_input_3
>perl ricfilter.pl test_input_3 test_output_3
># test output 3 should be blank
>
>Have fun!
>
>(*) However, the details(**) of the problem have been scrubbed so as
>to have little to do with my employer.
>
>(**) Extra points to someone who guesses what the real suffix that had
>to be added was (it wasn't .M), and why, though you'd need to be in a
>very small specific corner of the financial data processing world to
>know that.
>
>