Last Thursday I had a interview with a software company. During the interview that asked me write out a program which I was unable to complete within 10 minutes time. But I think am OK because their goal seemed to be to determine how I approached the problem rather than if I could produce a working program. <\/p>\n
Anyhow, I decided to finished the program during my spare time in case if it every comes up again. And here it is.<\/p>\n
Question:<\/b> (Not exact wording) My Program<\/b> TreeTest.groovy<\/b> (Test Cases)<\/p>\n Tree.groovy<\/b><\/p>\n Output<\/b> ( Run Tree.groovy 2 7 12 > output.txt )<\/p>\n Last Thursday I had a interview with a software company. During the interview that asked me write out a program which I was unable to complete within 10 minutes time. But I think am OK because their goal seemed to be to determine how I approached the problem rather than if I could produce a … Continue reading Interview Programming Challenge: Print me a tree<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[108,180,107],"class_list":["post-878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-questions-and-answers","tag-answer","tag-groovy","tag-interview-question"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=878"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":884,"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions\/884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bateru.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nDesign a program in any language that will print a tree using only UNICODE or\/and ANSI characters. The program should accept user input an integer value to set the base of the tree.
\nExample:<\/p>\n\r\n\/\/ base length is 7\r\n *\r\n ***\r\n *****\r\n*******\r\n *\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nI decided to use Groovy and Test Driven Development to solve this problem. After a little bit of thinking I managed to come up with the following two files that create a working program.
\nTree.groovy – Program that prints the tree
\nTreeTest.groovy – Test cases for Tree.groovy<\/p>\n\r\n\/**\r\n* @author Larry Battle\r\n* @date 1\/3\/2011\r\n* @purpose Provide test cases for the Tree class.\r\n*\/\r\nimport Tree;\r\n\r\nclass TreeTest extends GroovyTestCase{\r\n private Tree tree = new Tree();\r\n private testValues = [\r\n [baseLength:-1, level:-1, length:0],\r\n [baseLength:1, level:0, length:1],\r\n\t[baseLength:1, level:0, length:1],\r\n\t[baseLength:1, level:5, length:0],\r\n [baseLength:1, level:9, length:0],\r\n [baseLength:2, level:0, length:1],\r\n [baseLength:2, level:2, length:1],\r\n\t[baseLength:2, level:5, length:0],\r\n\t[baseLength:6, level:0, length:1],\r\n\t[baseLength:6, level:2, length:5],\r\n [baseLength:6, level:3, length:6],\r\n [baseLength:6, level:4, length:1],\r\n [baseLength:6, level:5, length:0],\r\n [baseLength:7, level:0, length:1],\r\n [baseLength:7, level:2, length:5],\r\n [baseLength:7, level:3, length:7],\r\n [baseLength:7, level:4, length:1],\r\n [baseLength:7, level:5, length:0]\r\n ];\r\n void testHeight(){\r\n def vals = [ 0:0, 1:1, 2:3, 3:3, 4:4, 7:5, 40:22 ];\r\n def msg;\r\n vals.each{\r\n msg = \"baseLength of {$it.key} should have height of {$it.value}\";\r\n assert tree.getHeight( it.key as short ) == it.value : msg;\r\n }\r\n }\r\n void testTreeBranchLength(){\r\n def msg; \r\n def length;\r\n testValues.each{ obj ->\r\n length = tree.getBranchLength( obj.level, obj.baseLength );\r\n msg = \"BaseLength $obj.baseLength at Level $obj.level should be $obj.length, not $length\";\r\n assert length == obj.length : msg;\r\n }\r\n }\r\n\/\/ Other test cases not included.\r\n}<\/pre>\n\r\n\/**\r\n* @author Larry Battle\r\n* @date 1\/3\/2011\r\n* @purpose Tree Interview Question: Display a tree in ansi format with a specified integer base length.\r\n*\/\r\n\/\/ function documentation excluded.\r\nclass Tree{\r\n short getHeight( baseLength ){\r\n short height = 0;\r\n if( baseLength > 0 ){\r\n height = 1;\r\n if( baseLength > 1 ){\r\n height += Math.floor( baseLength \/ 2 ) + 1;\r\n }\r\n }\r\n return height;\r\n }\r\n short getBranchLength( levelNum, baseLength ){\r\n short length = 0;\r\n short height = getHeight( baseLength );\r\n if( levelNum > -1 && height > levelNum ){\r\n if( height - levelNum == 2 ){\r\n length = baseLength;\r\n }else{\r\n if( height - levelNum == 1 ){\r\n length = 1;\r\n }else{\r\n length = 2 * levelNum + 1;\r\n }\r\n }\r\n }\r\n return length;\r\n }\r\n short getWhiteSpaceOnLeftNum( levelNum, baseLength ){\r\n short i = 0;\r\n short height = getHeight( baseLength );\r\n if( levelNum > -1 && height > levelNum ){\r\n if( height - levelNum == 2 ){\r\n i = 0;\r\n }else{\r\n if( height - levelNum == 1){\r\n levelNum = 0;\r\n }\r\n i = Math.floor( baseLength \/ 2 ) - levelNum;\r\n }\r\n }\r\n return i;\r\n }\r\n String getTreeBranch( levelNum, baseLength ){\r\n char x = '*';\r\n short xNum = getBranchLength( levelNum, baseLength );\r\n short spaceNum = getWhiteSpaceOnLeftNum( levelNum, baseLength );\r\n String str = \"\";\r\n spaceNum.times{\r\n str += ' ';\r\n }\r\n xNum.times{\r\n str += x;\r\n }\r\n return str;\r\n }\r\n String[] getTreeAsStrArr( short baseLength ){\r\n short height = getHeight( baseLength );\r\n return (0..height-1).collect{\r\n return getTreeBranch( it, baseLength );\r\n }\r\n }\r\n void printTree( short baseLength ){ \r\n if( 1 > baseLength || baseLength > 49 ){\r\n throw new Error( \"BaseLength must be bigger than 1 and less than 50.\" );\r\n }\r\n String[] strArr = getTreeAsStrArr( baseLength );\r\n println strArr.join( '\\n' );\r\n println \"------Base length = $baseLength -------\";\r\n }\r\n static void main( String[] args ){\r\n Tree a = new Tree();\r\n\tdef vals = [1,2,6,7,49];\r\n\tif( args.length ){\r\n\t\tvals = [];\r\n\t\targs.each{\r\n\t\t\tvals.push( Integer.parseInt( it ) );\r\n\t\t}\r\n\t}\r\n\tvals.each{\r\n\t\ta.printTree( it as short );\r\n\t}\r\n }\r\n}<\/pre>\n\r\n *\r\n**\r\n *\r\n------Base length = 2 -------\r\n *\r\n ***\r\n *****\r\n*******\r\n *\r\n------Base length = 7 -------\r\n *\r\n ***\r\n *****\r\n *******\r\n *********\r\n ***********\r\n************\r\n *\r\n------Base length = 12 -------\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"