I always feel bad when I try out a new coding problem for interviews because I feel I’m going to offend candidates with such an easy problem (I interview mostly for senior positions). And I’m always shocked by how few are able to solve them. The current problem I use requires splitting a text into words as a first step. I show them the text, it’s the entire text of a book, not just some simple sentence. I don’t think I’ve had a single candidate do that correctly yet (most just split by a single space character even though they’ve seen it’s a whole book with newlines, punctuation, quotes, parentheses, etc).
I am curious how you’d deal with the ambiguity of contractions vs. ending single quotes. I guess that character between letters can be assumed to be part of the word, but not if it’s between a letter and a space, for example. If you ignore contractions, hyphenated words, and accented characters, you could just match on /[a-zA-Z]+/.
I always feel bad when I try out a new coding problem for interviews because I feel I’m going to offend candidates with such an easy problem (I interview mostly for senior positions). And I’m always shocked by how few are able to solve them. The current problem I use requires splitting a text into words as a first step. I show them the text, it’s the entire text of a book, not just some simple sentence. I don’t think I’ve had a single candidate do that correctly yet (most just split by a single space character even though they’ve seen it’s a whole book with newlines, punctuation, quotes, parentheses, etc).
I am curious how you’d deal with the ambiguity of contractions vs. ending single quotes. I guess that character between letters can be assumed to be part of the word, but not if it’s between a letter and a space, for example. If you ignore contractions, hyphenated words, and accented characters, you could just match on
/[a-zA-Z]+/.That’s the thing, nobody even asks this question.
That would already put you in the top 10% of solutions I’ve seen so far on this problem.
My confidence in my job security and general programming abilities has skyrocketed after visiting this thread