Programming Praxis

We have an interview question today:

Input comes from a file containing pipe-delimited records with three fields: student id (a positive integer), course title (a string), and score (a positive integer). You may assume that any combination of student id and course is unique. Here’s an example input file:

22|Math|45
23|English|52
22|English|51
26|Math|72
23|Math|61
21|English|81

The file may have any number of records, and there is no limit on the number of unique courses. You should write a program to read the file and write a list of all courses in the file, combined with the score of the lowest-numbered student in the course. Thus, the correct output for the input shown above is:

Math 45
English 81

Your task is to write a program to solve the interview question; the original question specified a Java solution, but you are free to use any language. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

Pages: 1 2