This is an archive of the judge's response to questions on the problems. You should have received an email with the response already. This is available just in case the email got tossed to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.
gcc 4.4.1 is now being used for judging C/C++ solutions.
Problem 1
- How do we deal with word such as 'Ben's'
- Do we split into 'ben' and 's' or just 'ben'?
Ben's should be split into 2 words: `ben' and `s'
While I'm at it: there's been a few common failures on that problem. Please (carefully) read the output section for that problem. That section defines a word; in particular all non-alphabetic characters are to be ignored. Also note: read the input until you encounter the end of file. there can be blank lines in the input.
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Drat. There's some special characters in my test input/outputs that I didn't catch. They don't cause an issue if you check each character to make sure it's an alphabetic character (isalpha in c; I don't know what the equivalent is in java). They will cause a problem if try to check for characters to remove though.
So ... my advice is to make sure your solution checks for alphabetic characters rather than check for non-alphabetic characters. i.e., don't make a bunch of if statements checking to see if a character is not alphabetic. instead, check to make sure the character is alphabetic. (I realize that may be a bit vague, but I can't give much more without writing pseudo-code. The only characters that appear in a word are those in the range a - z or A-Z [which is then lower cased] )
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