Perl Weekly Challenge 161: words

It is sad that, after more than two years of me doing Raku, I still don’t have any production code project to work on. Therefore, in order to keep my coding and Raku-ing (is that a term?) knowdledge, I try to solve every Perl Weekly Challenge tasks.

In the following, the assigned tasks for Challenge 161.

• Task 1
• Task 2

and for the sake of some Perl 5, let’s do some stuff also in PostgreSQL Pl/Perl:

• Task 1 in PostgreSQL Pl/Perl
• Task 2 in PostgreSQL Pl/Perl

Last, the solutions in PostgreSQL PL/PgSQL:

• Task 1 in PostgreSQL Pl/PgSQL
• Task 2 in PostgreSQL Pl/PgSQL

PWC 161 - Task 1

The first task was about finding out abecedarian words from an established dictionary. The idea is to find out if a word has a sequence of letter already sorted. This is not that much complex in Raku, and in fact, part of the code is to check out if the dictionary file has been given correctly or not. I check every word in the dictionary splitting it into its set of letters, than sorting such letters and re-joining them into a word: if the initial word is equal to the obtained one than the letters are sorted.
I place the word into an array within an hash, the hash is keyed by the length of the word. This will allow me to print all the words with the same length into a block.

sub MAIN( Str $dictionary-file-name? = '../../data/dictionary.txt' ) {
    die "\nCannot find the dictionary [$dictionary-file-name]\n" if ! $dictionary-file-name || ! $dictionary-file-name.IO.f;

    # store the length and the list (array) of words for such length
    my %abecedarian-words;

    for $dictionary-file-name.IO.lines -> $word {
        # a word is abecedarian if the sorted letter composed word
        # is equal to the word itself
        %abecedarian-words{ $word.chars }.push: $word if ( $word.comb.sort.join ~~ $word );
    }

    # print the length and the list of words
    "( $_ ):\n { %abecedarian-words{ $_ }.join( ',' ) }".say for %abecedarian-words.keys.sort;

}

PWC 161 - Task 2

This task was about producing pangrams, a sentence where the words make the appearance of at least every letter in the alphabet. This a simplistic implementation, since it is not required to produce a sentence with a sense!
The task needs to use the same dictionary provided by the challenge.

sub MAIN( Str $dictionary? = '../../data/dictionary.txt' ){
    die "\nCannot find dictionary [$dictionary]" if ( ! $dictionary || ! $dictionary.IO.f );

    # read all the words in alphabetical order
    my @words = $dictionary.IO.lines.sort;


    my @letters =  'a' .. 'z' ;
    my @found;

    for @letters {
        # avoid to search a word if I've already one that
        # covers the current letter
        next if @found.grep( * ~~ / $_ / );

        # now search a new word
        @found.push: @words.grep( * ~~ / $_ / ).pick;
    }

    # all done
    @found.join( ' ' ).say;
}

Here I do iterate over all the letters, and search for a word that contains the current letter $letter only if I’ve not found already a word that contains such letter. I push every word into an array @found and then print it as a sentence.

PWC 161 - Task 1 in PostgreSQL PL/Perl

Please note that I’ve used a dictionary table that contains, one tuple per line, the words from the input file. I’m gonig to use such table in all the PostgreSQL related examples! In order to load the table easily, you can do something like the following:



The you are going to have a table with a single column, word that contains all the same data of the already mentioned text file.

The implementation of this task is pretty much the same as the Raku counterpart:



The words are extracted via a specific query using the spi_query function, that prepares the query, and then a tuple (i.e., a word) at a time is extracted via spi_fetchrow internal function. The word is contained into $row->{ word ] and I compare it against the join of the split into letters that are sorted. If they match, the function returns a new value appending it into the result set.

PWC 161 - Task 2 in PostgreSQL Pl/Perl

An implementation similar to the Raku one:



I do loop on every letter, and for each letter I do a single query to get a randomly chosen word that contains such letter. If I’ve already found such letter, than I skip to the next letter, otherwise I append the word to the result set. The aim of the @found array is just to smake the decision about seen words and letters, and thus to skip to another letter.

PWC 161 - Task 1 in PostgreSQL Pl/PgSQL

The task can be solved with a single SQL query:



The words CTE provides every word, along with its size (in chars), its list of letters (as unsorted array) and its listed list of letters. Note how the trick to sort the letters is to split the rod into a table, sort by ORDER BY and reconstruct it as an array with the ARRAY constructor.
Having doing this, it is possible to extract the words where the sorted and unsorted arrays have the same value (the = operator against arrays provide a deep element-by-element comparison), sorting it by the length of each word.

PWC 161 - Task 2 in PostgreSQL Pl/PgSQL

This is a straightforward implementation that reminds the PL/Perl one:



Since in PostgreSQL PL/PgSQL the FOR can loop only over ranges of integers, I use two variables start_letter and end_letter, to contain the ASCII value of the letters ‘a’ and ‘z’. Then, with the chr() function I can get back a character from a codepoint (well, an ASCII value).
After that I extract a randomly chosen single word from the dictionary table, and put it into the current_word variable. It is just a matter to append the current extracted word to the result set to get the job done. The aim of found_words is to represent a huge string with the selected-so-far words in order to be able to skip the searching for a word if a letter has been already coverd.