My brain’s algorithm for determining whether the current year is a leap year is based on US Presidential elections. They always happen on a leap year. Or do they?
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A timestamp is one of those tricky chunks of data that’s not really a single value. Often it’s a clutch of integers or — worse — it’s a string. To do time calculations on the timestamp, you must translate it into a more useful form.
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Most of the common data formats, such as CSV, XML, and JSON, use plain text to store complex data or somehow interpret that plain text as something it’s not. The programmer’s job is to translate the plain text and generate the proper type of complex data.
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Recently, I did some graphics programming. The task I gave myself was to highlight a JPEG by drawing a box around an interesting part of the image. The puzzle was which color to make the box so that it would stand out.
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Going back and forth happens frequently in the real world, and not just when you forget to pick up something at the store. Pendulums swing back and forth. The tide rises and falls. Politicians waffle.
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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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