Posts Tagged with "ruby"
Jan 22, 2007
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Shawn recently turned me onto a really cool site: Code Golf. Every week (or so) they post a coding challenge. The challenges themselves aren't overly difficult (well, most aren't). The real challenge is to complete the challenge with as little code as possible. . . literally. Your code submissions are first evaluated to determine if they work like they should, then they count how many bytes your program takes up. The shortest program for each accepted language (Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby) gets 10,000 points, with each longer program getting points based on their size relative to the winning submission.
I've only been able to complete two challenges so far. Both have fallen around the middle of the group with regards to size. I'm not sure I'll ever know the shortcuts to get my 228 byte program down to 102 bytes! It is a great excuse for exercising your brain, though.
UPDATE: I've started posting my submissions to the challenges that I've been able to complete. Just look for posts tagged with code golf.
Tagged: rubycode golf
Jan 12, 2007
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Here is my submission for the 99 Bottles of Beer challenge. Code size: 242 bytes.
a=' bottles of beer'
b=' on the wall'
d=a.tr 's',''
99.downto(1){|x|e,f=x.to_s,x<2?d:a
puts e+f+b+', '+e+f+'.'
puts 'Take one down and pass it around, '+(x-1).to_s+(x<3?d:f)+b+".\n\n"if x>1}
puts "Go to the store and buy some more, 99#{a+b}."
Tagged: code golfruby
Dec 11, 2006
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On Friday, Adam and I were talking about the different JavaScript libraries that are available and how bloated they are. They can easily double the page weight of your site. But, if you want to use the pre-canned goodness of Prototype or Scriptaculous, then that's the price you pay. We were trying to find ways to decrease the amount of files a user downloads when they visit our company Web site. One idea was to compress the CSS file and all of the large JavaScript files that we use. Well, I found a cool online service to compress and combine JavaScript files, but there were no readily available sources for shrinking any other kind of file that I could easily find. So, Adam told me to use sed via the command line and use the power of regular expressions to strip line breaks, tabs, and spaces out of the given file. Well, I don't know anything about regular expressions, and Adam couldn't recall the exact syntax off the top of his head. So, he retired to his corner and whipped up a nice little Ruby program to do it for us.
Enter the Shrinker!
You can download the Ruby file below. If you're on a Mac, just copy it to /usr/local/bin then CHMOD 777 it. After that, you can simply run sudo shrinker path/to/file and it will spit out a new file with the extension .shrunk that you can now name anything you want. Windows users can dump the file anywhere they want and then run, from the command line: ruby path/to/shrinker.rb path/to/file to get the same thing.
File: shrinker.rb (UPDATE: This file is no longer available, sorry.)
Tagged: rubyjavascriptscriptcss
