How do I combine elements in an array matching a pattern? - arrays

Question

I have an array of strings
["123", "a", "cc", "dddd", "mi hello", "33"]
I want to join by a space consecutive elements that begin with a letter, have at least two characters, and do not contain a space. Applying that logic to the above would yield
["123", "a", "cc dddd", "mi hello", "33"]
Similarly if my array were
["mmm", "3ss", "foo", "bar", "foo", "55"]
I would want the result to be
["mm", "3ss", "foo bar foo", "55"]
How do I do this operation?

Answer 1

There are many ways to solve this; ruby is a highly expressive language. It would be most beneficial for you to show what you have tried so far, so that we can help debug/fix/improve your attempt.
For example, here is one possible implementation that I came up with:
def combine_words(array)
array
.chunk {|string| string.match?(/\A[a-z][a-z0-9]+\z/i) }
.flat_map {|concat, strings| concat ? strings.join(' ') : strings}
end
combine_words(["aa", "b", "cde", "f1g", "hi", "2j", "l3m", "op", "q r"])
# => ["aa", "b", "cde f1g hi", "2j", "l3m op", "q r"]
Note that I was a little unclear exactly how to interpret your requirement:
begin with a letter, have at least two characters, and do not contain a space
Can strings contain punctuation? Underscores? Utf-8 characters? I took it to mean "only a-z, A-Z or 0-9", but you may want to tweak this.
A literal interpretation of your requirement could be: /\A[[:alpha:]][^ ]+\z/, but I suspect that's not what you meant.
Explanation:
Enumerable#chunk will iterate through the array and collect terms by the block's response value. In this case, it will find sequential elements that match/don't match the required regex.
String#match? checks whether the string matches the pattern, and returns a boolean response. Note that if you were using ruby v2.3 or below, you'd have needed some workaround such as !!string.match, to force a boolean response.
Enumerable#flat_map then loops through each "result", joining the strings if necessary, and flattens the result to avoid returning any nested arrays.
Here is another, similar, solution:
def word?(string)
string.match?(/\A[a-z][a-z0-9]+\z/i)
end
def combine_words(array)
array
.chunk_while {|x, y| word?(x) && word?(y)}
.map {|group| group.join(' ')}
end
Or, here's a more "low-tech" solution - which only uses more basic language features. (I'm re-using the same word? method here):
def combine_words(array)
previous_was_word = false
result = []
array.each do |string|
if previous_was_word && word?(string)
result.last << " #{string}"
else
result << string
end
previous_was_word = word?(string)
end
result
end

Answer 2

You can use Enumerable#chunk.
def chunk_it(arr)
arr.chunk { |s|
(s.size > 1) && (s[0].match?(/\p{Alpha}/)) && !s.include?(' ')}.
flat_map { |tf,a| tf ? a.join(' ') : a }
end
chunk_it(["123", "a", "cc", "dddd", "mi hello", "33"])
#=> ["123", "a", "cc dddd", "mi hello", "33"]
chunk_it ["mmm", "3ss", "foo", "bar", "foo", "55"]