Last month’s Exercise was rather silly: Rarely do you need to swap elements between two integer arrays. As Chris pointed out in the Exercise’s comments, “Would it not be easier to just use the array which contains the values you need?” Indeed, it is, which leads up to this month’s Exercise.
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I’m amazed, and a bit envious, when I look at other programming languages to discover a rich variety of functions, or “methods,” that do specific tasks the C language lacks. One of these tasks deals with arrays.
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Last month’s Exercise demonstrated a filename-extractor, but it cheated: The filename was always the same: same text, same length. That’s not always the case in the real world.
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A recent web page programming puzzle reminded me of an old BASIC language function, RIGHT$. The “right-string” function returns the rightmost n characters from a string. Such a function would have helped me greatly in my web page programming task.
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Last month’s Exercise was to write a filter that converts ASCII text into a percent-encoded format. This month, you’re task is to reverse the process: White a filter that converts a percent-encoded string back into the original ASCII.
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URL encoding is a method of translating ASCII codes (not just text or URLs) into what’s often referred to as percent encoding. You’ve probably seen this format on your web browser’s address bar or in a search engine’s text. The encoding format is necessary to preserve the original content as plain text.
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Consider the penny. It’s one cent, which was once a worthy sum before the government devalued the currency to the point where trays of pennies linger unwanted on convenience store checkout counters across the land. Why not do away with the penny?
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A perfect shuffle occurs when you shuffle a deck of cards so that all the cards from the second half of the deck are perfectly interspliced between the cards in the first half of a deck. Such a shuffle is illustrated in Figure 1.
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Today is May 1st. It’s the 121st day of the year 2017. In 2016, May 1 was the 122nd day of the year, because 2016 was a leap year. You can look up this information on a calendar or, more disappointingly, use Google. You can also write code that does the calculation for you, which is this month’s Exercise.
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Of all the annual holidays, Easter is the most difficult date to predict. It’s always a Sunday, but which one? It could land in March or April. Most people look at a calendar or (these days) use Google to find out when Easter occurs. Yet, you can write a program that tells you exactly when Easter falls.
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