Programming Praxis

Today’s exercise comes from one of those online code exercises, via Stack Overflow:

There is a machine that can fix all potholes along a road 3 units in length. A unit of road will be represented by a period in a string. For example, “…” is one section of road 3 units in length. Potholes are marked with an “X” in the road, and also count as 1 unit of length. The task is to take a road of length N and fix all potholes with the fewest possible sections repaired by the machine.

The city where I live needs one of those machines.

Here are some examples:

.X.          1
.X...X       2
XXX.XXXX     3
.X.XX.XX.X   3

Your task is to write a program that takes a string representing a road and returns the smallest number of fixes that will remove all the potholes. 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.

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