5 kyu

Directions Reduction

2,697 of 89,526g964

Description:

Once upon a time, on a way through the old wild mountainous west,…

… a man was given directions to go from one point to another. The directions were "NORTH", "SOUTH", "WEST", "EAST". Clearly "NORTH" and "SOUTH" are opposite, "WEST" and "EAST" too.

Going to one direction and coming back the opposite direction right away is a needless effort. Since this is the wild west, with dreadful weather and not much water, it's important to save yourself some energy, otherwise you might die of thirst!

How I crossed a mountainous desert the smart way.

The directions given to the man are, for example, the following (depending on the language):

["NORTH", "SOUTH", "SOUTH", "EAST", "WEST", "NORTH", "WEST"].
or
{ "NORTH", "SOUTH", "SOUTH", "EAST", "WEST", "NORTH", "WEST" };
or
[North, South, South, East, West, North, West]

You can immediately see that going "NORTH" and immediately "SOUTH" is not reasonable, better stay to the same place! So the task is to give to the man a simplified version of the plan. A better plan in this case is simply:

["WEST"]
or
{ "WEST" }
or
[West]

Other examples:

In ["NORTH", "SOUTH", "EAST", "WEST"], the direction "NORTH" + "SOUTH" is going north and coming back right away.

The path becomes ["EAST", "WEST"], now "EAST" and "WEST" annihilate each other, therefore, the final result is [] (nil in Clojure).

In ["NORTH", "EAST", "WEST", "SOUTH", "WEST", "WEST"], "NORTH" and "SOUTH" are not directly opposite but they become directly opposite after the reduction of "EAST" and "WEST" so the whole path is reducible to ["WEST", "WEST"].

Task

Write a function dirReduc which will take an array of strings and returns an array of strings with the needless directions removed (W<->E or S<->N side by side).

  • The Haskell version takes a list of directions with data Direction = North | East | West | South.
  • The Clojure version returns nil when the path is reduced to nothing.
  • The Rust version takes a slice of enum Direction {North, East, West, South}.
  • The OCaml version takes a list of type direction = | North | South | East | West.

See more examples in "Sample Tests:"

Notes

  • Not all paths can be made simpler. The path ["NORTH", "WEST", "SOUTH", "EAST"] is not reducible. "NORTH" and "WEST", "WEST" and "SOUTH", "SOUTH" and "EAST" are not directly opposite of each other and can't become such. Hence the result path is itself : ["NORTH", "WEST", "SOUTH", "EAST"].
  • if you want to translate, please ask before translating.
Fundamentals

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Stats:

CreatedMar 22, 2015
PublishedMar 22, 2015
Warriors Trained217870
Total Skips44818
Total Code Submissions549845
Total Times Completed89526
Ruby Completions2697
JavaScript Completions29218
Haskell Completions1108
Python Completions32338
Java Completions7795
CoffeeScript Completions70
C# Completions5272
Clojure Completions289
C++ Completions3711
PHP Completions1622
Crystal Completions28
F# Completions119
Rust Completions1200
C Completions864
TypeScript Completions1647
Swift Completions584
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Objective-C Completions15
OCaml Completions56
Elixir Completions189
Lua Completions160
Julia Completions68
Scala Completions368
PowerShell Completions55
Go Completions1249
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Racket Completions32
Reason Completions4
Kotlin Completions553
Prolog Completions27
Haxe Completions9
Pascal Completions12
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Elm Completions7
COBOL Completions10
D Completions6
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Total Stars5193
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