From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2006-06-25T03:37:57+09:00
Subject: Re: [SUMMARY] Short But Unique (#83)

On Jun 23, 2006, at 9:47 PM, Daniel Martin wrote:

> Ruby Quiz <james@grayproductions.net> writes:
>
>> Note that the last section of that method compares the pieces of the
>> string that will be left after the replacement with other strings in
>> the result set using the substring count method we examined earlier.
>> This code is there to prevent two strings from being compressed to
>> the same representation (though I doubt this weighted scoring system
>> is perfect).
>
> Actually, that's not why that code is there, or what it's doing.  What
> it's doing is favoring unique strings over non-unique strings.  For
> example:
>
> irb(main):002:0> %w(apple_juice orange_juice grape_juice
>                     prune_juice).compress(10)
> => ["apple...", "orange...", "grape...", "prune..."]
> irb(main):003:0> %w(orange_juice orange_marmalade orange_flavor
>                     orange_pulp).compress(10)
> => ["...juice", "...rmalade", "...flavor", "o...pulp"]
>
> The idea is that stuff common to all or almost-all of the original
> strings doesn't really help you when staring at a bunch of tabs.
> Abbreviating "orange_juice" as "orange..." makes sense when you have a
> bunch of juices, but not when you have a bunch of orange things.
>
> Avoiding previously used abbreviations is done with the bit:
>
>> 	          if retval.include?(candidate)
>> 	            record
>
> That is, if the to-be-returned list of abbreviations already includes
> this string, don't even score it and just assume that whatever else
> you had was better.  This leads to bad results when all the possible
> abbreviations are already taken.

Thanks for setting me straight Daniel.

> Also, if you're going to allow for unicode in the output, you really
> should allow it in the input, and change all those .length to .jlength
> calls, but I'm still holding out for true transparent unicode support
> in ruby 2.0...

Good point!

James Edward Gray II