Mini Coding Contests

[a_bertrand]

Ok: I have an assignment for you guys:

Write a script which reads a web page and extracts all the URL from the links...

2 criteria to designate the winner: short code, and fully working.

Time: 1 week. Next Sunday I will check the result and designate the winner, ok?

Submission: via email: bertrand (at) nodalideas {dot} com

Language: PHP (4 or 5)

You may submit as many trials you want, I will check them as soon as possible and give you my comment out. At then end I will post the winner name here, and his/her code. So please provide your forum name, and zip the code...

[a_bertrand]

Mini Coding Contests

2nd assignement: (an easy easy one)

Build the following figure with PHP and loops (no HTML / or huge echo block allowed)

*

***

*****

***

*

The shape need to be 10 height / 10 width

Same rules as before for the deadline and the submission

[a_bertrand]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

BTW at the end I will show you my solutions. Maybe it will not be the best one but at least it may help those which didn't managed to make it.

[Decepti0n]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

I'll do it :p

For the second one, is it just a diamond made up of '*'s?

[mdshare]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

dunno if the word shape is a hint, if so I would go for the GD library functions

[Decepti0n]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

GD or loops would be easy enough :p

[Aqua]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

 

This is a bit to easy :(

it is for some :)

[Decepti0n]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

Uh, enter then Deathstar

[mdshare]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

yea enter it, will be interesting to get input/comments from well one of the few people we know that hold a Zend certificate

[seanybob]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

 

2nd assignement: (an easy easy one)

Build the following figure with PHP and loops (no HTML / or huge echo block allowed)

*

***

*****

***

*

The shape need to be 10 height / 10 width

Same rules as before for the deadline and the submission

um... following the pattern, it would have to be 11 or 9 (seeing as to how the rows all contain an odd number of asterisks.

would you accept one of those? if so, I'm done.

or is there something I'm missing?

[a_bertrand]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

for the 2nd assignment,

GD is not allowed, you have to do it via ECHO :-P

And my mistake, it need to be 9 or 11 width... Actually it doesn't really matter as what is important is to see if you can code it, and if yes if you discover some shortcuts. I will give you a few solutions at the end... you will see, some are way easier than what we all think at the beginning :-P

[a_bertrand]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

Got the first result. It works BUT do not fully qualify as there is a . and not a space before the stars... now I will accept both, but the one which come with space will be voted better than the one with a . or other... I will let you find out how to display it correctly :-P

BTW there is at least 3 or 4 solutions to do it.

[seanybob]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

 

Got the first result. It works BUT do not fully qualify as there is a . and not a space before the stars... now I will accept both, but the one which come with space will be voted better than the one with a . or other... I will let you find out how to display it correctly :-P

BTW there is at least 3 or 4 solutions to do it.

;P

I could change the . to a space, but some servers seem to make the space disappear when I do it.

also, I could make it more efficient... aye caramba, spose I'll do it later. this is kinda fun ;)

and echo... print... same thing, right? :D

finally... instead of adding spaces or periods, could I just add a <center> command? :)

[Decepti0n]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

i p00ned it seany come on

[a_bertrand]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

echo and print are not exactly the same... nearly but not exactly... echo is slightly faster.

I will not say what you did as it is one option as nobody see the problem directly, but using space is possible... I will give the answer next week in case.

And yes center would be one of the trick but now you spoiled the fun :-P

So nobody will be allowed to use center anymore :-P

 

I could change the . to a space, but some servers seem to make the space disappear when I do it.

also, I could make it more efficient... aye caramba, spose I'll do it later. this is kinda fun ;)

and echo... print... same thing, right? :D

finally... instead of adding spaces or periods, could I just add a <center> command? :)

[a_bertrand]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

BTW I just made myself the second assignment, and without cheating and counting the <?PHP and ?> I have 6 lines of code (so no multiple code on a single line like "echo '1';echo '2'" that would be 2 lines not 1)

Now who will discover how I did it?

Hint: that's how my code look like:

1 <?PHP

2 for(...)

3 ....;

4 for(...)

5 ....;

6 ?>

And I'm not using center nor dots!

[a_bertrand]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

And the winners are:

Seanybob for the diamond shaped text

Deception for the link parser

Congratz to both!

So my solution for the diamond shaped text:

change the width value with a even number and your diamond will change.

As you can see you can avoid double loops ;-)

 

<PRE>
<?php
$width=12;
for($i=0;$i < ($width/2);$i++)
echo str_repeat(" ",($width/2)-$i).str_repeat("*",$i*2)."*\n";
for($i=($width/2)-2;$i >= 0;$i--)
echo str_repeat(" ",($width/2)-$i).str_repeat("*",$i*2)."*\n";
?>
</PRE>

 

and why not try to do all with one loop? Well that would be my solution then:

 

<PRE>
<?php
$width=12;
$half=array();
for($i=0;$i < ($width/2);$i++)
$half[]=str_repeat(" ",($width/2)-$i).str_repeat("*",$i*2)."*\n";
echo implode("",$half);
array_pop($half);
echo implode("",array_reverse($half));
?>
</PRE>

 

This second code is a bit longer but maybe executed a bit faster as we don't have to iterate in a second loop. The iteration is done with native PHP functions and therefore could be a bit faster.

BTW if you want to remove the <PRE></PRE> tag you could use the &nbps; tag in order to add spaces.

[ignite]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

Now a competition for the novices ?

[Raptor_Jesus]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

Interesting truth stated earlier about echo being faster than print. From what I read various places around 20% on some benchmarks comparing the two. Anyway thats good ammo to know, something simple over all can make a small but significant difference. Alot of people should remember that lil fact.

[Guest Anonymous]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

Grats Seany and rah ...good job to you both :)

[a_bertrand]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

Question: do you want a super easy contest as next one, or something which requires a bit of thinking?

[stryker]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

i agree with death, don't have time to f**k around.

[oxidati0n]

Re: Mini Coding Contests

Nice piece of code. lol ;)