TextParser

CLI tool written in typescript to showcase RegExp use and manipulate filesystem in Node.JS

Usage

After getting the repo and the latest Node version, run these commands

  npm run i

to install the required modules

  tsc

to run the typescript compiler, generating the index.js file

  node index.js

to run the actual tool via Node.JS

Purpose

This comes from a job interview exercise, feel free to try and compare.

Functions

The interface is pretty intuitive, asking the user to insert the path (either local or a remote URL starting with http(s)). After this the tool will check for the file existance and, if that is the case, prompt to choose if numbers in the report are to be included. Then it will calculate

• words in the file
• letters in the file
• spaces in the file
• words appearing more than 10 times and how many times they are present

Solution

The process is pretty straightforward, as we

• create the CLI instance to prompt question to the user
  • ask for the file and verify its existance
  • ask if numbers should be considered
• format the file as a string
• count spaces looping through every character
• count letters via a regexp match looping through every character
• parse the text, removing anything but words and putting them into an array (which gives us the words count)
• create a ledger object that stores each word and how many times they appear
• loop through the ledger and deleting keys for the words appearing less than 10 times
• finally, we can output the record

Conclusion

This was a pretty easy problem, I've personally chosen to include the axios library to manage http(s) requests as it was cleaner than using the http(s) modules included in Node.JS. While this might be an acceptable solution, I feel like many things could be improved. An example text file has been provided (commedia.txt).