That reminds me of a Rosetta code problem I did a few years ago at Perl Monks.
Write a Perl function to reverse a string of words.
For example, given an input string of:
" one two three four "
the function should produce:
"four three two one"
That is, the input string reversed word by word, with a single
space between each word and with no leading or trailing space.
You may assume the input string consists only of alphabetic
characters, spaces and tabs.
When you've written your function, you can view many solutions to this problem in Perl and other languages at Five Ways to Reverse a String of Words (C#, Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Haskell).
Update: Two more.
Given an input string, for example "ZBBBCZZ", produce a list, for example, ["Z", "BBB", "C", "ZZ"]. That is, break the input string into pieces based on change of character. Solutions at Yet Another Rosetta Code Problem (Perl, Ruby, Python, Haskell, ...).
Given a list of strings, for example ("a", "bb", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h"),
and a chunksize, for example 3, write a subroutine to return a multi-line string,
for example:
a bb c
d e f
g h
The output string must contain a single space between each array element and a newline every chunksize items.
Note that no trailing space is permitted on any line and
the last line must be properly newline-terminated.
Solutions at Rosetta code: Split an array into chunks.
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Oh, dear. Too bad I wasn't around for that one - my off-the-cuff solutions seem to be a good bit shorter than the ones presented there. {sigh} Oh, the things I lose out on by not having a time machine...
# Perl
$ perl -wlne'print "@{[reverse split]}"'
one two three four
four three two one
# Bash, as a script
#!/bin/bash
a=($@);for ((b=${#a[*]};b>=0;b--)); do c+=(${a[$b]}); done
echo ${c[*]}
Not that this addresses the original question. :)
Back on topic: some years ago, Mark-Jason Dominus ran a "Quiz-of-the-Week" mailing list in which he came up with interesting challenges for Perl hackers. As I recall, he wasn't able to continue it; some other people tried carrying it (Shlomi Fish among them, IIRC), but it eventually died off. While it lasted, however, it was quite a bit of fun - it might be worth your while to take a look at the archives and see if anything strikes your fancy.
--
"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."
-- B. L. Whorf
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