TextAnalyzer

A text analyzing program.

Setup

Bundler is required. If it is not installed, gem install bundler.

bin/setup

Usage

bin/text_analyzer file1.txt file2.txt

cat file.txt | bin/text_analyzer

bin/text_analyzer <(curl -s http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2009/pg2009.txt)

Running tests

bundle exec rake

Design Decisions

• Use threads for IO when given multiple files. In Ruby, threading won't speed up the actual analysis, but it can help with IO-bound tasks like reading in files.
  • For simplicity, we assume that we are not given an excessively large number of input files, and start a new thread for each input file.
• In the event of a tie that spans the threshold of TextAnalyzer::Analyzer::RANK_CUTOFF, the behavior of the program is unspecified; as such, no attempt is made to apply ordering beyond the occurrence count.
• This submission is presented as a gem, even though all of the heavy lifting is done by the TextAnalyzer::Analyzer class. I wanted to decouple the CLI (i.e. bin/text_analyzer) from the TextAnalyzer module code, and the standard gem structure of bin vs. lib provided a natural way to do so. I could also see additional classes (e.g. configuration, results) becoming valuable if the project were to become any more complicated, and the current structure is well-positioned for such extensions.