caesar cipher check in ocaml - string

I want to implement a check function that given two strings s1 and s2 will check if s2 is the caesar cipher of s1 or not. the inter face needs to be looked like string->string->bool.
the problem is that I am not allowed to use any string functions other than String.length, so how can I solve it? i am not permitted any list array, iterations. Only recursions and pattern matching.
Please help me. And also can you tell me how I can write a substring function in ocaml other than the module function with the above restrictions?

My guess is that you are probably allowed to use s.[i] to get the ith character of string s. This is the same as String.get, but the instructor may not think of it in those terms. Without some form of getting the individual characters for the string, I believe that this is impossible. You should probably double check with your instructor to be sure, but I would be surprised if he had meant for you to be unable to separate a string into characters (which is something that you cannot do with pattern-matching alone in Ocaml).
Once you can get individual characters, the way to do it should be pretty clear (you do not need substring to traverse each string recursively).
If you still want to write substring, creating it would be complex since you don't have access to String.create or other similar functions. But you can write your own version of String.create using recursion, one character string literals (like "x"), the ability to set a character in a string to another (like s.[0] <- c), and string concatenation (s1 ^ s2). Again, of course, all of this is assuming that those operators are allowed to be used.

Related

Get value of nth char in string in rust

How do I get the value of a character at position n in a string?
For example, if I had the string "Hello, world!", how would I get the value of the first character?
It's simple as s.chars().nth(n).
However, beware that like said in the docs:
It’s important to remember that char represents a Unicode Scalar Value, and might not match your idea of what a ‘character’ is. Iteration over grapheme clusters may be what you actually want. This functionality is not provided by Rust’s standard library, check crates.io instead.
See How to iterate over Unicode grapheme clusters in Rust?.
For the first character specifically, you can use s.chars().next().
If your string is ASCII-only, you can use as_bytes(): s.as_bytes()[n]. But I would not recommend that, as this is not future-proof (though this is faster, O(1) vs O(n)).

Make a model to identify a string

I have a string like this
ODQ1OTc3MzY0MDcyNDk3MTUy.YKoz0Q.wlST3vVZ3IN8nTtVX1tz8Vvq5O8
The first part of the string is a random 18 digit number in base64 format and the second is a unix timestamp in base64 too, while the last is an hmac.
I want to make a model to recognize a string like this.
How may i do it?
While I did not necessarily think deeply about it, this would be what comes to my mind first.
You certainly don't need machine learning for this. In fact, machine learning would not only be inefficient for problems like this but may even be worse, depending on a given approach.
Here, an exact solution can be achieved, simply by understanding the problem.
One way people often go about matching strings with a certain structure is with so called regular expressions or RegExp.
Regular expressions allow you to match string patterns of varying complexity.
To give a simple example in Python:
import re
your_string = "ODQ1OTc3MzY0MDcyNDk3MTUy.YKoz0Q.wlST3vVZ3IN8nTtVX1tz8Vvq5O8"
regexp_pattern = r"(.+)\.(.+)\.(.+)"
re.findall(regexp_pattern, your_string)
>>> [('ODQ1OTc3MzY0MDcyNDk3MTUy', 'YKoz0Q', 'wlST3vVZ3IN8nTtVX1tz8Vvq5O8')]
Now one problem with this is how do you know where your string starts and stops. Most of the times there are certain anchors, especially in strings that were created programmatically. For instance, if we knew that prior to each string you wanted to match there is the word Token: , you could include that in your RegExp pattern r"Token: (.+)\.(.+)\.(.+)".
Other ways to avoid mismatches would be to clearer define the pattern requirements. Right now we simply match a pattern with any amount of characters and two . separating them into three sequences.
If you would know which implementation of base64 you were using, you could limit the alphabet of potential characters from . (thus any) to the alphabet used in your base64 implementation [abcdefgh1234]. In this example it would be abcdefgh1234, so the pattern could be refined like this r"([abcdefgh1234]+).([abcdefgh1234]+).(.+)"`.
The same applies to the HMAC code.
Furthermore, you could specify the allowed length of each substring.
For instance, you said you have 18 random digits. This would likely mean each is encoded as 1 byte, which would translate to 18*8 = 144 bits, which in base64, would translate to 24 tokens (where each encodes a sextet, thus 6 bits of information). The same could be done with the timestamp, assuming a 32 bit timestamp, this would likely necessitate 6 base64 tokens (representing 36 bits, 36 because you could not divide 32 into sextets).
With this information, you could further refine the pattern
r"([abcdefgh1234]{24})\.([abcdefgh1234]{6})\.(.+)"`
In addition, the same could be applied to the HMAC code.
I leave it to you to read a bit about RegExp but I'd guess it is the easiest solution and certainly more appropriate than any kind of machine learning.

Why is Julia giving me StringIndex error?

I'm getting a StringIndex error for one particular string out of 10,000 which I am processing. I don't really know what the issue is with this string. I think it is probably a special character issue.
If I println the string then assign it to txt then pass txt to the function, I don't get an error. I am a little baffled.
I am sorry, I can't post the string as it is protected content and even if I did copying and pasting the string somehow removes the source of error. Any suggestions?
Just to expand. The details of how String is represented in Julia are explained in the Julia manual.
You can use eachindex to get an iterator of valid indices into a String. The reason why it is an iterator is that you cannot efficiently (i.e. in O(1) time) find an index of i-th character in the string. However, you can use isascii function on a String to check if it consists only of ASCII characters (in which case byte and character indices are the same).
Also if you need to get to some specific character in a string you usually need probably more than one character, in which case first, last and chop functions are useful (actually last(first(s, n)) gives you a character at position n; although it is not most efficient - iterating eachindex will allocate less).
In Julia Strings are indexed by bytes rather than characters. You should use for c in str rather than trying to index manually.

Reversing string in ocaml

I have this function for reversing strings in ocaml however it says that I have my types wrong. I am unsure as to why or what I can do :(
Any tips on debugging would also be greatly appreciated!
28 let reverse s =
29 let rec helper i =
30 if i >= String.length s then "" else (helper (i+1))^(s.[i])
31 in
32 helper 0
Error: This expression has type char but an expression was expected of type
string
Thank you
Your implementation does not have the expected (linear) time and space complexity: it is quadratic in both time and space, so it is hardly a correct implementation of the requested feature.
String concatenation sa^sb allocates a new string of size length sa + length sb, and fills it with the two strings; this means that both its time and space complexity are linear in the sum of the lengths. When you iterate this operation once per character, you get an algorithm of quadratic complexity (the total size of memory allocated, and total number of copies, will be 1+2+3+....+n).
To correctly implement this algorithm, you could either:
allocate a string of the expected size, and mutate it in place with the content of the input string, reversed
create a string list made of reversed size-one strings, then use String.concat to concatenate all of them at once (which allocates the result and copies the strings only once)
use the Buffer module which is meant to accumulate characters or strings iteratively without exhibiting a quadratic behavior (it uses a dynamic resizing policy that makes addition of a char amortized constant time)
The first approach is both the simplest and the fastest, but the other two will get more interesting in more complex application where you want to concatenate strings, but it's less straightforward to know in one step what the final result will be.
The error message is pretty clear, I think. The expression s.[i] represents a character (the ith character of the string). But the ^ operator requires strings as its arguments.
To get past the problem you can use String.make 1 s.[i]. This expression gives a 1-character string containing the single character s.[i].
Handling strings recursively in OCaml isn't as nice as it could be, because there's no nice way to destructure a string (break it into parts). The equivalent code to reverse a list looks a lot prettier. For what it's worth :-)
You can also use 3rd party libraries to do so. http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/ already implements a function for reversing strings

Extracting information in a string

I would like to parse strings with an arbitrary number of parameters, such as P1+05 or P2-01 all put together like P1+05P2-02. I can get that data from strings with a rather large (too much to post around...) IF tree and a variable keeping track of the position within the string. When reaching a key letter (like P) it knows how many characters to read and proceeds accordingly, nothing special. In this example say I got two players in a game and I want to give +05 and -01 health to players 1 and 2, respectively. (hence the +-, I want them to be somewhat readable).
It works, but I feel this could be done better. I am using Lua to parse the strings, so maybe there is some built-in function, within Lua, to ease that process? Or maybe some general hints , or references for better approaches?
Here is some code:
for w in string.gmatch("P1+05P2-02","%u[^%u]+") do
print(w)
end
It assumes that each "word" begins with an uppercase letter and its parameters contain no uppercase letters.

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