ICS 492 Ruby on Rails

Metropolitan State University

Spring 2008

Week 1 Programming Assignment

1. Install InstantRails at home

2. Write a program to create a word histogram.

Inputs:

• The name of a text document

Processing:

• Open and read the text document
• Make a list of all the unique words in the document
• Count the number of occurrences of each word
• Count the total number of words in the document

Outputs:

• Display the words and their counts
• Display the total number of words in the document
• (Optional) Display the words and their counts in order from most frequent to least frequent
• (Optional) Display only the 20 most frequent words and their counts

Definition of a word:

• Any set of alphabetic characters delimited by spaces or punctuation (Hint: split on whitespace which can be represented by the regular expression /\W/ )
• Words are case insensitive. That is, “Dog” == “dog”
• Blank lines, spaces and punctuation are not words

An Easier Solution: Just to get started, you can assume your file has one word per line. But for your final solution, you must handle files with punctuation and multiple words per line.

Due date:

• May 15, 2008 (preferred)
• May 29, 2008 (final deadline)

It is in your best interests to get each weekly assignment working as you go. However, no late penalties will be applied. All work must be completed and demonstrated to the instructor by May 29. No exceptions.

Turn in:

• Demonstrate your program to the instructor during lab.
• If your program does not pass the instructor’s test data, you will be asked to fix your program before it will be accepted.