My friend’s daughter got a family assignment from school to commemorate 100th day in school. If each letter in the English alphabet is assigned a weight corresponding to it’s position (e.g. "a" is 1, "b" is 2, … "z" is 26) then she was supposed to collect 10 words whose letters sum total to 100.
They spent last 1.5 days and found only 3 words and were discussing the problem at the lunch table earlier today. Here is a small piece of code that I wrote to help them out:
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.StringTokenizer;
public class Main {
private static final char[] WEIGHT = {
'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k',
'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v',
'w', 'x', 'y', 'z'
};
/**
* @param args the command line arguments
*/
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
if (args.length == 0) {
System.out.println("At least one argument required");
return;
}
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(args[0]));
String string = in.readLine();
while (string != null) {
StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(string);
while (tokenizer.hasMoreTokens()) {
String word = tokenizer.nextToken();
if (wordStrength(word) == 100)
System.out.println("100 letters old: " + word);
}
string = in.readLine();
}
}
static int wordStrength(String word) {
int strength = 0;
for (int i=0; i<word.length(); i++) {
int charStrength = Arrays.binarySearch(WEIGHT, word.charAt(i));
if (charStrength >= 0)
strength += charStrength+1;
}
return strength;
}
}
}
This application was easily created using NetBeans 6. And then I copy/pasted articles from my favorite news sites in a file, passed it as command-line argument by right-clicking the project, selecting "Properties" and specifying the file name in "Arguments".
Hit F6, and voila got more than 10 words 
Technorati: netbeans school assignment
Arun,
Great help. Thanks!
/.rocky
Comment by Rocky — February 6, 2008 @ 2:48 pm
Since you also talk about Ruby and Rails here a lot, I did the same thing in the ruby version of the Netbeans IDE. Here’s the ruby code:
#!/bin/ruby
@weight = %w{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z}
if ARGV.size < 1 then
puts ‘At least one argument required’;
exit!
end
def word_strength(word)
word.split(”).inject(0) { |sum, c|
sum += (@weight.include? c) ? @weight.index(c) + 1 : 0;
}
end
ARGF.each do |line|
line.chomp.split(/ /).each { |word|
puts "100 letters old: " + word if word_strength(word) == 100
}
end
Comment by Erik — February 8, 2008 @ 2:34 pm
This is nice, thanks!
Comment by Arun Gupta — February 11, 2008 @ 5:54 pm