Re: Challenge - Creative Way To Detect Alpha Characters

To all those, including myself, who are using, or had used, two lists (a..z , A..Z): Why not just convert the string to either upper or lower case before working on it so that only 26-element list, instead of 52, would be needed?

In my case ... i didn't even think of it until i was working on the Rexx solution. To repent, below is perl translation....

sub has_alpha
{ my ($string) = @_;

  return unless length $string;

  $string = lc $string;
  my ($start , $stop) = qw/a z/;

  while ($start le $stop)
  { index($string , $start++) != -1 and return 1;
  }
  return;
}
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Comment on Re: Challenge - Creative Way To Detect Alpha Characters Select or Download Code

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Re^2: Challenge - Creative Way To Detect Alpha Characters by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Sep 14, 2004 at 21:50 UTC
You'd then have to scan the list twice. Once to convert, once to compare. The original (and best) solution did 3 passes by both upping and lowing the string and comparing, but all three passes where in C rather than perl, so fast. Examine what is said, not who speaks. "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham "Think for yourself!" - Abigail "Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Challenge - Creative Way To Detect Alpha Characters by parv (Parson) on Sep 14, 2004 at 22:05 UTC
(I removed my comment about the first statement of BrowserUK about which i am still thinking.) Yes, you are quite right, BrowserUK, on the point of original solution being the best; it is simple, short, and to the point.	[reply]