The Mod Out System
June 23, 2009
Over at The Daily WTF, Alex Papadimoulis catalogs some insanely bad programming practices. The Mod Out System is one of the best … worst … absolutely sickening … no boss, I would never do such a thing … well, you get the point.
The hero of the story, Gary, must write a function to expand a list of ranges like 1-6,9,13-19 into a list without ranges like 1,2,3,4,5,6,9,13,14,15,16,17,18,19.
Your task is to write that function. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 
[…] Praxis – The Mod Out System By Remco Niemeijer Today’s Programming Praxis problem is an easy one: all we have to do is convert a string that contains […]
My Haskell solution (see http://bonsaicode.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/programming-praxis-the-mod-out-system/ for a version with comments):
import Data.List.Split modOut :: String -> [Int] modOut = concatMap ((\(a:b:_) -> [a..b]) . cycle . map read . sepBy "-") . sepBy "," main :: IO () main = print $ modOut "1-6,9,13-19"In Scala:
object ModOutSystem {
def modOut(s: String) =
s split “,” flatMap { _ split “-” match {
case Array(single) => List(single.toInt)
case Array(from, to) => List.range(from.toInt, to.toInt + 1)
} }
def main(args: Array[String]) = println(modOut(“1-6,9,13-19”).deepToString) // Array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19)
}
Pretty nice post. I just came by your blog and wanted to say
that I have really enjoyed reading your posts. Any way
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In Python2.x:
def combineranges(a):
b = [[int(j) for j in i.split(“-“)] for i in a.split(“,”)]
c = []
[c.extend(range(b[i][0],b[i][len(b[i])-1]+1)) for i in range(len(b))]
return c
print combineranges(“1-6,9,13-19”)
In Ruby:
def expand(s)
s.inject {|x,y| x..y}.to_a
end
def mod_out(mod_string)
mod_string.split(“,”).collect {|x| x.split(“-“)}.collect {|x| expand(x)}.join(“,”)
end
puts mod_out “1-6,9,13-19”
A quick hack in Common Lisp.
(defun mod-out (ranges)
(flatten
(loop for range in ranges
collect (if (consp range)
(loop for i from (car range) to (cdr range) collect i)
range))))
;; usage
(mod-out ‘((1 . 6) 9 (13 . 19)))
Take FLATTEN from your favorite utility library or write it yourself.