This code challenge will test your ability to quickly develop a solution to a straightforward, but open-ended, problem. You can use any language you are most comfortable with, and you are free to use existing libraries. It can be solved in a variety of ways but we've structured it so that you won't be able to to use a single off the shelf solution.
Command line template and data file processor.
- Parse a template file, specified as the first command line argument, into an in-memory representation.
- Read a data file containing variable bindings from STDIN, parsing it into an in-memory representation.
- Apply the data to the template.
- Output the result to STDOUT.
- If any variable placeholders in the template are not supplied, your program should not produce any output.
- Leading or trailing whitespace in variable names and values should be stripped.
NOTE: Your program should be able to accept any arbitrary template and data files as parameters not just the ones provided for the test.
Hello, ((person)).
The text wrapped in double-parentheses ((( and ))) is a variable placeholder.
person=Jane Doe
Each line in the data file represents a variable binding.
In this example, person is a variable name, and Jane Doe is its corresponding variable value.
Hello, Jane Doe.
The variable placeholder has been replaced with the corresponding variable value.
There is a script in the root of this directory called run.sh,
which you will use to launch your program.
You will most likely need to alter it to run the program you build,
depending on the language used.
The run script will be called like:
./run.sh template-file < data-file > output-file
That is, a template file will be supplied as the first argument, the data file will be supplied via STDIN, and your program should output the result on STDOUT.
There is a script called test.sh,
which will execute run.sh with the example template called template
for every file in the input directory.
It will capture the output of your program for
each of these input files into the output directory.
It will then compare the output directory to the expected directory,
which contains the expected outputs from a correct program.
You can use this test script as you develop.
Once the test passes, you are done!
- How does your program handle errors?
- How robust is your program against invalid input?
- Is it written in a way that another programmer can understand it?
- Is there enough testing?
Please fork the repository to your own account, do your work there, and submit a pull request.
Good luck!