The odd binary string

Weekly Challenge 193

Challenge, My solutions

Two relatively straight forward tasks this week, so not as much commentary as usual.

Task 1: Binary String

Task

You are given an integer, $n > 0.

Write a script to find all possible binary numbers of size $n.

My solution

Thankfully both Python and Perl provide easy methods to convert a (base 10) integer into a binary number with leading zeros. For the integer x with y leading zeros, we can use format(x, '0yb') in Python, and sprintf('%0yb', x) in Perl.

With that out of the way, we know that all binary numbers can be converted from the integers between 0 and 2ⁿ-1 (inclusive).

Examples

$ ./ch-1.py 2
00, 01, 10, 11

$ ./ch-1.py 3
000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111

Task 2: Odd String

Task

You are given a list of strings of same length, @s.

Write a script to find the odd string in the given list. Use positional value of alphabet starting with 0, i.e. a = 0, b = 1, ... z = 25.

Find the difference array for each string as shown in the example. Then pick the odd one out.

My solution

This task can be broken into three sub tasks:

1. Create a dict (hash in Perl) called letter_map that maps the letters of the alphabet to integers, where letter_map['a'] is 0, and letter_map['z'] is 25.
2. Convert each word into a space separated values of differences. So adc is converted to 3 -1. With this information I have an occurrences dict where the key is the converted string and the value is a list of words that match that pattern.
3. Calculate an array unique_words of values in occurrences that only have one value. If there is only one unique word, I display that. If not, I display an error.

Examples

$ ./ch-2.py adc wzy abc
abc

$ ./ch-2.py aaa bob ccc ddd
bob