in reply to Re: Re: Re: Function over all letters in a string
in thread Function over all letters in a string

I found that part of the spec ambiguous and so made up a convenient definition.
You also apparently made a convenient definition of the phrase "random number". :)

Personally, I'd like something that has a chance of producing a long string, but favouring shorter ones. Hence, a simple 1 + int rand 12 won't do. Rather, I'm tempted to use an exponential function: 

$_ = 'cat';
s/(.)/$1 x int(12**rand)/ge;
print;

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Which, for example, prints 
caaatttttttt

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Re: Function over all letters in a string
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Dec 01, 2003 at 11:21 UTC
    But that still puts an arbitrary (low) limit on the number of repetitions. The code below doesn't: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

$_ = 'cat';

s/(.)/my $t = $1; $t .= $1 while 0.95 > rand; $t/ge;

print "$_\n";

__END__
cccccccccccccaaaaat

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    Abigail

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Function over all letters in a string
by tilly (Archbishop) on Dec 01, 2003 at 14:39 UTC
    You would have a larger range of possible numbers with: 
    $string =~ s=(\w)= $1 x (1 - 1/log(rand)) =eg;

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