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

• The program can be run either of the following ways filename | java Gibgen java Gibgen "my sentence to scramble"
• What programming language did you use? I used Java
• Also tell us anything else the reviewer should know about your code I think it's pretty strait forward, I hope you don't have any issues. I compiled it using JDK 6.0_65 on OSX Mavericks. It was written and tested in Dr.Java.

Coding Questions

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

My approach to the problem was to break it down into smaller pieces. After reading 
the specs a few times to get a feel for the problem, I thought about what needed to 
be done. I wrote methods to determine if a given character was an alphabet letter 
and if a given string was an uppercase abbreviation. Then, I started writing a 
method to scramble a given string. Once I felt like there were  enough pieces to 
get a basic program running, I started on a method to read in a string from given 
source, break it into tokens, and scramble the tokens if they were valid. After I 
finished a rough solution, I started testing it on the given input files in the 
repo. Comparing the output of the program with the output files, I went back and 
refactored and cleaned up the program.

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

I think the hardest part for me was all of the possible cases for a given token, 
such as if it had trailing punctuation or was an upper case abbreviation with an 
"'s" at the end. Also deciding if the program should account for things like a 
period at the end of a sentence that didn't have a space after it. In that case 
it would be treated like one word with punctuation inside of it instead of two 
separate words. String parsing can be difficult because there are so many possible 
cases depending on what you're doing. I just had to decide what was reasonable to 
do and what wasn't.