My First Erlang Program

I’ve been looking for some elementary ‘puzzles’ to code up in Erlang so I can figure out the language a bit. In passing, I came across Facebook’s “Programming Puzzles” page.

So today, the rest of the family went to a birthday party and I stayed home to solve the first puzzle and get my hands dirty with some Erlang.

Here is the resulting code….

-export([ handle_file/1 ]).

handle_file(Fname) ->     case file:read_file(Fname) of         {ok, FData} ->             parse(FData);         {error, Reason} ->             {error, Reason}     end.

parse(Bin) ->     do_hoppity_hop(lists:seq(1,list_to_integer(lists:nth(1,string:tokens(binary_to_list(Bin)," \t\r\n"))))).

do_hoppity_hop([Head|Tail]) when Head rem 5 == 0, Head rem 3 == 0 ->     io:format(‘Hop~n’,[]),     do_hoppity_hop(Tail);

do_hoppity_hop([Head|Tail]) when Head rem 3 == 0 ->     io:format(‘Hoppity~n’,[]),     do_hoppity_hop(Tail);

do_hoppity_hop([Head|Tail]) when Head rem 5 == 0 ->     io:format(‘Hophop~n’,[]),     do_hoppity_hop(Tail);

do_hoppity_hop([Head|Tail]) ->     do_hoppity_hop(Tail);

do_hoppity_hop([]) -> false.

If anyone has any feedback, I’d love to hear it. This is the first time I sat down and actually wrote anything in Erlang, so I won’t be offended. :-)

I should probably write a quick python version too, just so I know that skill set isn’t totally wasting away. ;-)

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