From: Erik Veenstra <erikveen@...>
Date: 2008-03-19T08:20:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Food Database (#159)

I've combined 3 of my own libraries, which resulted in a 30
minutes solution for this quiz.

The 3 parts are:

 * Hash#nearest instead of Hash#[]
 * Caching the result of an already parsed data file
 * Indexing of a data file of lines

Combine these parts into one sentence: "How can we find the
best matching key in a cached index of a data file?" Which was
pretty much the task of the quiz in one sentence...

I'll explain my solution bottom-up, which roughly means: the
opposite of the order in which the code executes.

By the way, here're the timings. Searching for the food
"QUINOA,CKD". All runs result in the same output.

 "quinoa,ckd   "Exact key, not cached           0m1.078s
 "quinoa,ckd   "Exact key, cached               0m0.081s
 "quinoa       "Partial key, cached             0m0.159s
 "qinoa        "Partial key with typo, cached   0m0.179s

The Code + Explanation:
http://dark-code.bulix.org/srih9o-65866

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/