Programming

Count how many submissions per score

 in SQL  tagged count / group by / max / order by / sql / truncate by

Recently, we had access to a database that contained the scores of a programming competitions system.
The database contained several contests, each contest contained several challenges and any competitor could make multiple submissions.
We wanted to extract a couple of charts showing

  • how many submissions we had per score and
  • how many submissions we had per score while filtering out the best submission (max score) per contestant per challenge per contest

The following code will return the number of submissions per score per challenge per contest.


SELECT contest_id, challenge_id, TRUNCATE(score, 1), COUNT(*)
FROM submissions
GROUP BY contest_id, challenge_id, TRUNCATE(score, 1)
ORDER BY contest_id, challenge_id, TRUNCATE(score, 1);

The next one will return the number of submissions per score per challenge per contest while filtering out the best submission (max score) per contestant per challenge per contest:


SELECT contest_id, challenge_id, TRUNCATE(max_score, 1), COUNT(*)
FROM
(
  SELECT contest_id, challenge_id, competitor_id, MAX(score) AS max_score
  FROM submissions
  GROUP BY contest_id, challenge_id, competitor_id
) AS max_scores
GROUP BY contest_id, challenge_id, TRUNCATE(max_score, 1)
ORDER BY contest_id, challenge_id, TRUNCATE(max_score, 1);

Converting a (void*) buffer to a std::vector

 in C / C++ / Programming  tagged C++ / cast / casting / vector / void by

On a project we were recently working on, some legacy C code was producing a (void*) voidBuffer accompanied by its size.
The rest of the project was in C++ and we needed to convert the (void*) voidBuffer to a std::vector<unsigned char> vector.

To do so, we used the following code:


//First cast the (void *) voidBuffer to an (unsigned char *) to implicitly get the element size (1 Byte each)
const unsigned char *charBuffer = (unsigned char *) voidBuffer;
//Then we create the vector (named vectorBuffer) by copying the contents of charBuffer to the vector
std::vector<unsigned char> vectorBuffer(charBuffer, charBuffer + length);

[download id=”4084″]

Remove all non digit characters from String

 in Java  tagged digit / filter / java / numbers / numeric / pattern / regex / regular expression / replaceAll / string by

The following Java snippet removes all non-digit characters from a String.
Non-digit characters are any characters that are not in the following set [0, 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5 ,6 ,7 ,8, 9].


myString.replaceAll("\\D", "");

For a summary of regular-expression constructs and information on the character classes supported by Java pattern visit the following link.

The \\D pattern that we used in our code is a predefined character class for non-digit characters. It is equivalent to [^0-9]that negates the predefined character class for digit characters [0-9].

Java: remove leading character (or any prefix) from String only if it matches 1

 in Java  tagged ?: ternary operator / haystack / java / length / needle / startsWith / string / substring by

The following snippet allows you to check if a String in Java starts with a specific character (or a specific prefix) that you are looking for and remove it.
To keep the number of lines small, we used the Java ?: ternary operator, which defines a conditional expression in a compact way.
Then, to quickly check if the first character(s) is the one we are looking for before removing it we used the String.startsWith().
To compute the number of characters to remove we used the String.length() on the needle.
Finally, to strip the leading character(s) we used String.substring() whenever the prefix matched.


final String needle = "//";
final int needleSize = needle.length();
String haystack = "";
haystack = haystack.startsWith(needle) ? haystack.substring(needleSize) : haystack;
System.out.print(haystack);

haystack = "apple";
haystack = haystack.startsWith(needle) ? haystack.substring(needleSize) : haystack;
System.out.println(haystack);

haystack = "//banana";
haystack = haystack.startsWith(needle) ? haystack.substring(needleSize) : haystack;
System.out.println(haystack);

The above code will result in the following:


apple
banana

 

Bonus: to remove all the instances of a character anywhere in a string:


final String needle = "a";
final int needleSize = needle.length();
String haystack = "banana";
haystack = haystack.replace(needle,"");
System.out.println(haystack);

The above code will result in the following:

bnn

Bonus: to remove the first instance of a character anywhere in a string:


final String needle = "a";
final int needleSize = needle.length();
String haystack = "banana";
haystack = haystack.replaceFirst(needle,"");
System.out.println(haystack);

The above code will result in the following:

bnana