WordChecker

This project was developed by Iacopo Ermacora (iacopoermacora@gmail.com) as part of the university exam for Algorithms, Principles of Computer Science, and Data Structures at Politecnico di Milano in 2022.

Objective

The goal of this project is to build a system that checks the correspondence between the letters of two words of equal length. The words are considered as sequences of symbols, including lowercase (a-z) and uppercase (A-Z) alphabetic characters, numeric digits (0-9), as well as the symbols "-" (hyphen) and "_" (underscore).

System Description

The system reads a sequence of information and instructions from the standard input and produces output strings based on different cases. The input sequence includes:

• A value k indicating the length of the words.
• An arbitrary sequence of words, each of length k, which constitutes the set of permissible words. It is assumed that the sequence of words does not contain duplicates.
• Following that, a sequence of "matches" is read from the standard input. Each match starts with the command "+nuova_partita" (Italian for "new game").
• The input sequence for each match (after the "+nuova_partita" command) is structured as follows:
  • A reference word (of length k characters).
  • It is assumed that the reference word belongs to the set of permissible words.
  • The maximum number n of words to be compared with the reference word.
  • A sequence of words (each of length k characters) to be compared with the reference word.
• Occasionally, the command "+stampa_filtrate" may appear in the input sequence. Its effect is explained later.
• Additionally, during a match or between matches, the commands "+inserisci_inizio" and "+inserisci_fine" can appear, enclosing a sequence of new words to be added to the set of permissible words.
• The added words are also of length k, and it is always assumed that there are no duplicate words (even with respect to the existing permissible words).

Comparison Logic

For each word p read from the input, to be compared with the reference word r, the program writes a sequence of k characters to stdout using the following rules:

• Let p[1], p[2], ..., p[k] denote the characters of word p, r[1], r[2], ..., r[k] denote the characters of word r, and res[1], res[2], ..., res[k] denote the characters of the printed sequence.
• For each 1 ≤ i ≤ k:
  • If p[i] is equal to r[i], then res[i] is '+', indicating that p[i] is in the correct position.
  • If p[i] does not appear anywhere in r, then res[i] is '/', indicating that p[i] is not present in r.
  • If p[i] appears in r but not in the i-th position, then res[i] is '|' unless there are ni instances of p[i] in r, where ni is the number of instances of the character p[i] that are in the correct position. Moreover, there should be at least ni - ci characters equal to p[i] that are in the incorrect position before the i-th character in p, where ci ≤ ni.

For further clarification or access to the full project, please contact the developer, Iacopo Ermacora, at iacopoermacora@gmail.com.