Question

Does the input file need to be directly processed by the program?

say in the latest Beautiful strings question,

5

ABbCcc

Good luck in the Facebook Hacker Cup this year!

Ignore punctuation, please 🙂

Sometimes test cases are hard to make up.

So I just go consult Professor Dalves

how would i handle it say in javascript?

Many thanks

Answer 1

For this you can use the node.js filesystem api (also write your code in node.js – it’s on google v8 so it should be fast enough for this one)

EDIT

I thought about your problem and it can be more simply solved (without using node.js) making a AJAX request to the file. You can achieve this like so :

var xmlhttp;
if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
  {   // code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
      xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
else
  {   // code for IE6, IE5
      xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function()
  {
  if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200)
    {
    // This logs the input.txt contents in the console.
    // You can do whatever you want with it
    console.log(xmlhttp.responseText);
    }
  }
xmlhttp.open("GET","input.txt",true);
xmlhttp.send();
}

If you are a beginner you can read more stuff about AJAX requests on W3Schools

You can choose the method that suites better for you! Good luck!