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Kata: Concatenate N N Times

 
Sheriff
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Last night was our local Functional Kats {Belfast} meetup group that an ex-colleague and I organise. The kata we worked on was a particularly fun one and good enough to share with all you good Ranchers.

Functional Kats Kata wrote:
Concatenate N N Times

A number like 7777777 consists of the number 7 concatenated to itself 7 times. A number like 121212121212121212121212 consists of the number 12 concatenated to itself 12 times. That is to say: the number X consists of the number N concatenated to itself N times.

Your task is to write a program that calculates the number that is concatenated to itself, and the number of times it appears.


(Source: programmingpraxis.com)

Have a go yourself and post your solutions. And most importantly... Have fun!
 
Tim Cooke
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I'll start with a Clojure solution:


With output:
 
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Should it be functional or is a good old OO approach allowed?
 
Tim Cooke
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In the context of our meet up we don't prescribe a language but we do stipulate encourage that it's done in a functional style.

But, in the context of CodeRanch anything goes. Choose whatever language and style you wish.
 
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Oracle SQL. This ought to be easier in SQL Server, because of REPEAT().

Output:
 
Stephan van Hulst
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Haskell:

Output:
 
Master Rancher
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In Scala:
 
Stephan van Hulst
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Inspired by Mike (shows you it pays off if you know the libraries):

This solution probably runs a lot slower for longer strings though.
 
Mike Simmons
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Yeah, I went for brevity and simplicity over performance - could be a big difference for larger strings, as you note. I came up with a much more efficient alternative, rejecting many candidates based only on the input length, before it ever looks as the individual characters (once, at most). Roughly analogous solutions in functional Scala:

...and old-school Java
 
Mike Simmons
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My mind keeps coming back to this one. Here's a much shorter Java solution, probably not quite as fast as the last two, but much faster than my first Scala solution above. And it doesn't even use any features newer than JDK 1.4:
 
Mike Simmons
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Though I guess that should really be

And the formula used to calculate word length (varible n) is an approximation, but from testing, it's accurate through the range of all possible input array lengths, up through Integer.MAX_VALUE. So unless we need to test longer input than that, we're good...
 
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Great one, Mike!

Minor point: it fails with "0202", but it is not clear if such a string is within the bounds of the assignment.
My Pojo (with some obligatory lambdas, although an old fashioned java one would be more readable):

 
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