Code Challenge: Gibberish Generator

Challenge Overview

Your response to this challenge can be used to supplement your SWEAP application. If you plan to complete this challenge for SWEAP, ensure you meet the other minimum requirements by visiting here. Whether you apply or not, you are welcome to fork this repository and complete as a personal project challenge.

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The Basics:

• You may use almost any programming language... it's your choice. See the supported options here.
• Your program should leave the first and last letter of each word in place and scramble the rest.
• Your program should not scamble punctuation (.,-'...etc.), numbers, or upper-case abbreviations.
• For example gibberish, see the /textfiles folder. Two sample output files are provided: xxx.txt.gib

Input/Output:

• Name your program as follows: gibgen.xx (where xx is variable based on the language you choose)
• Your program should be able to read text input from a string passed into STDIN
  • gibgen.xx "This is a String"
  • cat mystringfile.txt | gibgen.xx
• Your program should output to the console.

Note: This challenge is based on a popular word gibberish meme. You can improve the readability by looking at a researcher's take on the truths/myths of this meme, but this is not required.

What to do

1. Download & install Git on your machine

2. Fork this project - Go here and click the "Fork" button (located on the upper-right side of the screen)

3. Clone your new fork'd repository to your local machine - git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/gibgen.git

4. Complete the code challenge and fill out the Quick Start & Questions in the the README (see below)

5. git add and git commit your local repository as you go

6. Push your code and README back to GitHub occasionally - git push origin master

7. Email serp@ge.com with the Commit URL to your fork'd repository that you want reviewed. It should include at least 2 files: (1) your updated README with Coding Questions answered, and (2) your program (gibgen.xx)

   • Go here: https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/gibgen/commits/master
   • Find the commit that you'd like us to review. The commit date must be on or before 11:59pm (central) on April 4, 2014!
     • Click the "Browse Code ->" link for that commit
   • Copy and paste the URL into the email along with your name... it should look something like this:
     • https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/gibgen/tree/73afe0c8fe2...hash.hash...e80afea72b6

Note: If you have any questions, email serp@ge.com. I will do my best to respond to any questions.

Judging Criteria

Your responses to the Coding Questions at the bottom of this README are the Most Important part of this challenge. A working, fully fault-tolerant program that we just can't break, albeit awesome, is the least important. Why is that? Remember, we don't expect you to be expert programmers (just yet)... We want to see how you think through a problem.

For completion by applicant

Quick Start

To run this program you must have python 2.7.6 installed on your computer.

It will accept input as an argument or as STDIN

• 'python2 gibgen.py "This is a String"'
• 'cat mystringfile.txt | python2 gibgen.py'

This was written in Python 2.7.6

This implementation works well for all cases that I tried except when two separate words are separated only by a special character (e.g. hyphen), where it treats that as one word.

Coding Questions

Question 1: "How did you approach the problem?" (500 words or less)

I approached the project at hand through a simplify-complicate strategy. While the problem seemed trivial at first, I began to realize that the devil was in the details – the punctuation, the spaces, the first and last letters of each word, etc. So I first simplified the problem to the base case – scrambling only the middle letters in a word while avoiding the first and last. Once I worked out how to solve that I introduced the required complications one at a time until my solution fit the whole problem.

Question 2: "What was the most difficult aspect of the solution?" (500 words or less)

The most difficult part of the solution was making sure that the punctuation within or around words would not become scrambled. I started the problem by solving the simple case without having to do much work on the character level: I removed the first and last characters of a “word”, mixed up the rest, and put it all back together. This actually worked quite well and was very simple but was not nearly robust enough to deal with punctuation. After a bit of thought I realized that I just needed to generalize my existing solution: first filter out the characters that would need jumbling and then jumble them in place. Once I did this the rest of the solution came together quickly.