Welcome! Today, you'll explore handling and manipulating strings in Go, a fundamental skill in many programming areas. Specifically, you'll learn how to identify consecutive groups of identical characters in a string. Excited to enhance your skills? Let's dive in!
In this lesson, your objective is to write a Go function that takes a string as input and identifies all consecutive groups of identical characters within it. A group is a segment of text wherein the same character is repeated consecutively.
Your function should return a slice of structs. Each struct will consist of the repeating character and the length of its repetition. For example, if the input string is "aaabbcccaae", your function should output: {'a':3, 'b':2, 'c':3, 'a':2, 'e':1}.
While processing the input string, for simplicity we focus only on alphanumeric characters without considering their case. Other characters won't affect the group formation.
Ready to discover how to accomplish this task? Let's get started!
To solve a problem, it's crucial to first establish our scope by taking preliminary steps. We'll start by defining a charGroup struct to hold character group data — Character for the character, and Length for its repetition count. Then, we'll initialize an empty slice groups to store our results. We'll also declare two variables, currentGroupChar and currentGroupLength, which will help us monitor the character of the current group and the length of its consecutive sequence.
Go1// Struct to store character group data 2type charGroup struct { 3 Character rune 4 Length int 5} 6 7// Function to find consecutive character groups in a string 8func findCharGroups(s string) []charGroup { 9 var groups []charGroup // Slice to store the groups of characters 10 var currentGroupChar rune // Variable to hold the current character group 11 var currentGroupLength int // Variable to hold the length of the current character group 12}
With the setup in place, we are ready to process the input string. We'll use a loop to examine each character. At every step, the character is checked using the unicode package to see if it is alphanumeric.
Go1import "unicode" 2 3 4// Function to find consecutive character groups in a string 5func findCharGroups(s string) []charGroup { 6 var groups []charGroup // Slice to store the groups of characters 7 var currentGroupChar rune // Variable to hold the current character group 8 var currentGroupLength int // Variable to hold the length of the current character group 9 10 for _, c := range s { 11 if unicode.IsLetter(c) || unicode.IsDigit(c) { // Check if the character is alphanumeric 12 } 13 } 14}
As the loop executes, if a character matches currentGroupChar, it means the group is continuing, and we increment currentGroupLength. If the character differs, it signals the start of a new group.
When a new group starts, we'll append the current group (if it exists) to groups, then update currentGroupChar and currentGroupLength.
Go1// Function to find consecutive character groups in a string 2func findCharGroups(s string) []charGroup { 3 var groups []charGroup // Slice to store the groups of characters 4 var currentGroupChar rune // Variable to hold the current character group 5 var currentGroupLength int // Variable to hold the length of the current character group 6 7 for _, c := range s { 8 if unicode.IsLetter(c) || unicode.IsDigit(c) { // Check if the character is alphanumeric 9 if c == currentGroupChar { // If the character is part of the current group 10 currentGroupLength++ // Increment the length of the current group 11 } else { // If the character starts a new group 12 if currentGroupChar != 0 { // Append the previous group to groups if it exists 13 groups = append(groups, charGroup{currentGroupChar, currentGroupLength}) 14 } 15 currentGroupChar = c // Update the current character to the new group 16 currentGroupLength = 1 // Reset the length for the new group 17 } 18 } 19 } 20}
After the loop ends, ensure any remaining group is appended to groups. A final check on currentGroupChar is needed to ensure no groups are missed.
Go1// Function to find consecutive character groups in a string 2func findCharGroups(s string) []charGroup { 3 var groups []charGroup // Slice to store the groups of characters 4 var currentGroupChar rune // Variable to hold the current character group 5 var currentGroupLength int // Variable to hold the length of the current character group 6 7 for _, c := range s { 8 if unicode.IsLetter(c) || unicode.IsDigit(c) { // Check if the character is alphanumeric 9 if c == currentGroupChar { // If the character is part of the current group 10 currentGroupLength++ // Increment the length of the current group 11 } else { // If the character starts a new group 12 if currentGroupChar != 0 { // Append the previous group to groups if it exists 13 groups = append(groups, charGroup{currentGroupChar, currentGroupLength}) 14 } 15 currentGroupChar = c // Update the current character to the new group 16 currentGroupLength = 1 // Reset the length for the new group 17 } 18 } 19 } 20 21 if currentGroupChar != 0 { // Add the last group if it exists 22 groups = append(groups, charGroup{currentGroupChar, currentGroupLength}) 23 } 24 25 return groups // Return the slice of groups 26}
Congratulations! You've now learned how to identify consecutive character groups in a string using Go. This skill is handy for analyzing text or preprocessing data. To reinforce your understanding, practice similar problems regularly. Consistent effort is key to mastery. Now, go ahead and tackle some string manipulation exercises in Go!