p14c2

1 files changed, 59 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/challenge-014/dave-jacoby/p14c2.pl b/challenge-014/dave-jacoby/p14c2.pl
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..a36c3983e4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/challenge-014/dave-jacoby/p14c2.pl
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env perl
+
+use feature qw{ say };
+use strict;
+use warnings;
+
+# Using only the official postal (2-letter) abbreviations for the
+# 50 U.S. states, write a script to find the longest English word
+# you can spell? Here is the list of U.S. states abbreviations as
+# per wikipedia page. This challenge was proposed by team member
+# Neil Bowers.
+
+# using the %states hash makes for easy testing
+my %states = map { $_ => 1 } qw{
+    AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE FL GA
+    HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD
+    MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ
+    NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC
+    CD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY
+};
+
+# more universally available than my go-to dictionary DB
+my @words;
+if ( open my $fh, '<', '/usr/share/dict/words' ) {
+    @words = map { chomp; uc $_ } <$fh>;
+}
+
+my $longest = '';
+FOR: for my $word (@words) {
+    my @word = $word =~ /(\w{2})/g;
+
+    # there are apostrophes and unicode in that list
+    # this ensures that what we're looking at is valid.
+    my $join = join '', @word;
+    next unless $join eq $word;
+
+    # we check every letter pair and determine if it's in
+    # the states hash. we have labelled the outside for loop
+    # as FOR, so we can `next` on the outer loop, not just the
+    # inner loop.
+    for my $wo ( @word ) {
+        my $n = $states{$wo} ? 1 : 0;
+        next FOR unless $n;
+    }    
+
+    # words that are not entirely made out of state abbreviations
+    # will not reach this point. And this will ignore words of 
+    # identical size to the found longest, but I know they don't
+    # exist.
+    $longest = $word if length $longest < length $word;
+}
+say $longest;
+
+__DATA__
+
+CACOGALACTIA
+
+    noun In pathology, a bad condition of the milk.
+