Is 7 l8r than 9? (Is seven later than nine?)

Question

This is a fairly simple code golf challenge. Your program, given an ASCII string, is to parse that string into two strings, which it will evaluate. If the second string is "later" than the first one, it will return a 1, if it is "earlier" than the first one, it will return a -1, and if they are the same, it will return 0. To clarify what "later" and "earlier" mean, let's take a look at ASCII character codes. You need to compare each character of the string, treating each of them as digits of a number. Later refers to a larger number, occurring after a smaller number. Strings will be formatted with a hyphen character to separate the two input groups.

Take a look at this example:

7-9 as an input should return 1.

7 converts to ASCII code 55, and 9 converts to ASCII code 57.

As 57 occurs numerically after 55, 9 is later than 7.

Another example:

LKzb-LKaj as an input should return -1

The ASCII code sequences for this are 76-75-122-98 and 76-75-97-106

This is a code golf challenge, and byte count is how entries will be scored.

Any input from the 95 printable ASCII characters is accepted, excluding spaces, and hyphens for anything but separating the input. In addition, strings are not guaranteed to be the same length.

Good luck!

EDIT: To be more clear, each character is to be treated like a digit in a number. In the example LKzb-LKaj, though j is later than b, z is later than a, and since it is a more significant digit, it takes precedence. A string supplied will always be at minimum 3 characters, eliminating empty strings from the scope of this problem.

EDIT: Here are some more test cases, for your help:

• A-9 -> -1
• 11-Z -> -1
• 3h~J*-3h~J* -> 0
• Xv-Y0 -> 1

Answer 1

Pyth - 11 bytes

Easy, uses ._ sign to get the sign and C to get char codes.

._-F_CMcz\-

Try it online here.

Test suite.

._               Sign of number
 -F              Fold subtraction (this finds difference of a tuple)
  _              Reverse list to get correct order of operands when subtracting
   CM            Map char, already treats strings as digits of base256 number
    c \-         Split by "-"
     z           Input

Answer 2

CJam, 12 bytes

l'-/esfb~\-g

Try it online in the CJam interpreter.

How it works

l   e# Read a line from STDIN.
'-/ e# Split it at spaces.
es  e# Push the current time (milliseconds since epoch).
fb  e# Consider each string as digits in base huge-number.
~\  e# Dump the results and reverse their order.
-g  e# Subtract and apply sign function.

Answer 3

Java, 86 118

int f(String...s){return(int)Math.signum((s=s[0].split("-"))[1].compareTo(s[0])*(s[0].length()==s[1].length()?1:-1));}  

---

A very strange way of comparing strings. Made a quick fix so it passes additional test cases, will look for more golfiness later.

Thanks to Vartan in comments for signum suggestion

Answer 4

Perl, 31 bytes

#!/usr/bin/perl -p
/-/;$_=($`.$'^$`)cmp($'.$`^$')

30 bytes + 1 byte for -p. Accepts input on STDIN.

Explanation

When the operands to cmp have different lengths, like chicken and egg, they are aligned like this:

c  h  i  c  k  e  n
e  g  g  \0 \0 \0 \0

so that egg > chicken (\0 is a null byte). But we want them to be aligned like this:

c  h  i  c  k  e  n
\0 \0 \0 \0 e  g  g

so that chicken > egg.

To do this, we concatenate them, once with chicken before egg and once with egg before chicken:

c  h  i  c  k  e  n  e  g  g
e  g  g  c  h  i  c  k  e  n

Now that our two strings are the same length, we remove the leading word using an XOR to get:

\0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 e  g  g
\0 \0 \0 c  h  i  c  k  e  n

And now we can use cmp to find which came first. (There, I said it!)

Answer 5

Python 2, 88 characters

a=raw_input().split('-');print-cmp(*(map(ord,s.rjust(max(map(len,a)),'\0'))for s in a))

cmp doesn't do the right thing when you have two different length strings, so I have to pad both of them with the null character (which ord converts to 0) to handle that case. Unfortunately, that added about 35 characters, plus it's now two lines instead of one because I need both the length of the input and to iterate over it.

Answer 6

R, 54 Bytes

This requires the pracma library. It splits the input string on the -. Right justifies the strings. Ranks them and does a diff.

So for 11-7 we end up with the strings "11" and " 7". The rank of these is [2, 1]. The difference is -1. For 3h~J*-3h~J* we get "3h~J*" and "3h~J*". The rank of these is [1.5, 1.5] with a diff of 0.

diff(rank(pracma::strjust(scan(,'',sep='-'),"right")))

Test Examples

> diff(rank(pracma::strjust(scan(,'',sep='-'),"right")))
1: LKzb-LKaj
3: 
Read 2 items
[1] -1
> diff(rank(pracma::strjust(scan(,'',sep='-'),"right")))
1: A-9
3: 
Read 2 items
[1] -1
> diff(rank(pracma::strjust(scan(,'',sep='-'),"right")))
1: 11-Z
3: 
Read 2 items
[1] -1
> diff(rank(pracma::strjust(scan(,'',sep='-'),"right")))
1: 3h~J*-3h~J*
3: 
Read 2 items
[1] 0
> diff(rank(pracma::strjust(scan(,'',sep='-'),"right")))
1: Xv-Y0
3: 
Read 2 items
[1] 1

Answer 7

CoffeeScript, 143 140 139

f=(s)->[a,b]=((t=s.split '-').map (y)->Array((m=Math.max) 1, 1+(m ((l=(c)->c.length) t[0]),l t[1])-l y).join('\u0000')+y);`b<a?-1:(b>a?1:0)`

Here is a jsfiddle with the results (look in the console)

Answer 8

PERL, 46 36 Bytes

print$2cmp$1if"@ARGV"=~/(\S+)-(\S+)/

Converts the argv list into a string, splits by the hyphen into a left and right sided no spaces arg, then returns a cmp call.

Answer 9

Python 3, 84 bytes

x,y=[int.from_bytes(i.encode(),"big")for i in input().split("-")];print((x<y)-(y<x))

Split the string input by "-". Convert the unicode strings to bytes strings, then interpret these byte strings as big-endian integers. Finally do the comparison -- (un)fortunately cmp is no longer available in Python 3.

Python 2, 69 bytes

print -cmp(*[int(i.encode("hex"),16)for i in raw_input().split("-")]) 

Answer 10

Python 2, 79 bytes

Pretty simple solution, and it's easy to understand. Compares string lengths, then compares the strings lexigraphically.

Try it here

s,t=raw_input().split('-')
x,y=len(s),len(t)
print(x<y)*2-1if x-y else cmp(t,s)

Answer 11

perl5, 64

perl -aF- -pe '@f=map{length}@F;$_=$f[1]<=>$f[0]||$F[1]cmp$F[0]'

Just run it from the commandline. although it would look better with a new line but that costs 1 char.

perl -laF- -pe '@f=map{length}@F;$_=$f[1]<=>$f[0]||$F[1]cmp$F[0]'

This longer version handles mismatched lengths correctly.

Answer 12

F#, 53

fun s->let[|a;b|]=s="";s.Split[|'-'|]in b.CompareTo a

This is in the form an anonymous function (lambda), so you have to paste it and provide the parameter directly after is (or, using the piping notation). For example (in FSI):

> "7-9" |> fun s->let[|a;b|]=s="";s.Split[|'-'|]in b.CompareTo a
1
> "abc-abc" |> fun s->let[|a;b|]=s="";s.Split[|'-'|]in b.CompareTo a
0
> "LKzb-LKaj" |> fun s->let[|a;b|]=s="";s.Split[|'-'|]in b.CompareTo a
-1

Answer 13

JavaScript ES6, 46 43 bytes

f=s=>((a=s.split('-'))[1]>a[0])-(a[1]<a[0])

Answer 14

Ruby, 59 bytes

a,b=gets.chomp.split ?-
p (b.size<=>a.size).nonzero?||b<=>a

Answer 15

05AB1E, 12 11 9 bytes

'-¡₄ö¥0.S

Try it online or verify all test cases.

Explanation:

'-¡          # Split the (implicit) input on '-'
             #  i.e. 'LKzb-LKaj' → ['LKzb','LKaj']
   ₄ö        # Convert both parts to a Base-1000 number
             #  i.e. ['LKzb','LKaj'] → [21020061037,21020036045]
     ¥       # Push the deltas (subtraction between each sub sequential pair) of the list
             #  i.e. [21020061037,21020036045] → [-24992]
      0.S    # Get the sign [1 for a>0; -1 for a<0; 0 for a==0] (and output implicitly)
             #  i.e. [-24992] → [-1]