the blog

Interview question (Nice!)

Date

9/06/2007 11:04:00 PM [permalink]

Author

yahooza

Entry

M' boss, Bart, asked a nifty interview question to a potential candidate that I found intriguing: "Gimme a function that determines a string's length without the use of local variables" He explained it to me and I spruced it up to parse a paragraph of text:

function f(s) {
return (s.length>0)?(((null===s.charAt(0).match(/\S/))?0:1)+f(s.substring(1))):0;
}

Neat.

Labels: programming

Comments

3 +add yours

1.  Manish:

   function len($str) {
   return preg_match_all("/./", $str, $unused);
   }

   Monday, September 10, 2007 10:03:00 AM
2.  yahooza:

   function len($str) {
   return preg_match_all("/\S/", $str, $unused);
   }
   
   that'll return the number of characters, sans whitespaces. in PHP of course.

   Monday, September 10, 2007 6:14:00 PM
3.  bartt:

   All versions so far return the string's length in bytes not in characters. How would you make your function work with any natural language? E.g. Chinese, English, Dutch, etc.

   Tuesday, September 11, 2007 10:47:00 AM