Multiple Arrays

You are given two or more arrays. Write a script to display values of each list at a given index.

For example:

Array 1: [ I L O V E Y O U ]
Array 2: [ 2 4 0 3 2 0 1 9 ]
Array 3: [ ! ? £ $ % ^ & * ]

We expect the following output:

I 2 !
L 4 ?
O 0 £
V 3 $
E 2 %
Y 0 ^
O 1 &
U 9 *

The pound sign is not part of the standard ASCII, so we’ll need to properly encode it. The use utf8; clause tells perl that the script itself contains UTF-8 encoded characters, the binmode function sets the encoding for the given filehandle, i.e. standard output.

Guest Book

A guest house had a policy that the light remain ON as long as the at least one guest is in the house. There is guest book which tracks all guest in/out time. Write a script to find out how long in minutes the light were ON.

1) Alex    IN: 09:10 OUT: 09:45
2) Arnold  IN: 09:15 OUT: 09:33
3) Bob     IN: 09:22 OUT: 09:55
4) Charlie IN: 09:25 OUT: 10:05
5) Steve   IN: 09:33 OUT: 10:01
6) Roger   IN: 09:44 OUT: 10:12
7) David   IN: 09:57 OUT: 10:23
8) Neil    IN: 10:01 OUT: 10:19
9) Chris   IN: 10:10 OUT: 11:00

If we visualise the input, we’ll see that it represents the easy case: the first guest turns the light on, and it stays on until the last guest leaves. But in the general case, the guest house might be empty several times a day, causing the lights being turned off and back on repeatedly.

Fortunately, CPAN has a tool to handle even the general case. It uses so called Inversion Lists: instead of storing each minute, we just store the times when the light changes its state. I first learned about the concept in the PerlMonks article RFC: The Lazy Manager’s Calendar with Inversion Lists.

Date Finder

Create a script to accept a 7 digits number, where the first number can only be 1 or 2. The second and third digits can be anything 0-9. The fourth and fifth digits corresponds to the month i.e. 01, 02, 03…, 11, 12. And the last 2 digits respresents the days in the month i.e. 01, 02, 03…, 29, 30, 31. Your script should validate if the given number is valid as per the rule and then convert into human readable format date.

RULES

1. If 1st digit is 1, then prepend 20 otherwise 19 to the 2nd and 3rd digits to make it 4-digits year.
2. The 4th and 5th digits together should be a valid month.
3. The 6th and 7th digits together should be a valid day for the above month.

For example, the given number is 2230120, it should print 1923-01-20.

As we’ve done several times, we’ll use the core module Time::Piece to handle dates.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use Time::Piece;

sub validate {
    my ($number) = @_;

First, we’ll check the length of the input string.

    die 'Invalid length' unless length $number == 7;

Weekdays

Write a script to calculate the total number of weekdays (Mon-Fri) in each month of the year 2019.

I used the core module Time::Piece and its companion from the same distribution, Time::Seconds. Let’s start on the first day of the month, and keep adding one day while we stay in the same month. Along the way, count the days that aren’t Saturdays and Sundays.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use Time::Piece;
use Time::Seconds qw{ ONE_DAY };

sub days_in_month {
    my ($month) = @_;
    my $date = 'Time::Piece'->strptime("2019 $month 1 12:00",
                                       '%Y %b %d %H:%M');
    my $count = 0;
    while ($date->month eq $month) {
        ++$count unless grep $date->day eq $_, qw( Sat Sun );
        $date += ONE_DAY;
    }
    return $count
}

And here’s a test that the numbers are correct:

VIN Validation

Write a program to validate given Vehicle Identification Number (VIN).

I followed the description at Wikipedia. Sometimes, it wasn’t exactly clear whether the described rule should be valid everywhere or just in a part of the world; the rules also developed with time, so older vehicles can bear VINs that would be considered invalid for a modern car.

Most of the validation is implemented in a single subroutine validate_vin. It takes two parameters, $vin and $sold: the second one says where the car was sold. "North America" and "China" are two values that trigger a different behaviour of the validator.