Text Formatting

Question A - Text Formatting

The first question of the ACM is usually the warmup, and it was no exception this year. The problem's title pretty much sums up what it's about - given lots of lines, tokenize, word wrap, output the number of lines.
Which also describes how to solve it:
  • Parse the input cases, one at a time, by reading each line and splitting into tokens (good for this is Scanner in Java or stringstream in C++).
  • Count the number of lines and the #characters on the current line. For each word, either add it to the current line (plus the two spaces) if it fits, or put it at the start of the next line.
And that's it - (untested) code can be found here.

Personally, I had thought more teams should have been able to solve this, however it's possibly due to some of the tricks (e.g. not adding extra two spaces at the start of a new line) and maybe because string input is usually seen as nastier to handle than numbers [it seems, anyway]. Still, an ok warmup nonetheless.

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