Topic: | Tanning Salon |
Source Code: | salon.cpp |
Live Archive Ref#: | 2538 |
In-Class Day: |
Thursday, Feb. 6 |
Submission Deadline: | Sunday, Feb. 9, by 11:59pm |
Techniques: |
Arrays, loops, and characters |
Please review the general information about lab assignments.
Read the complete problem description and then determine what the expected output should be if given the following input:
Prelab input: | Prelab output: |
2 CBALLMMACZBDDZ 5 VWXYZWVXYZABCDEFFABCDE 0 |
Tan Your Hide, Inc., owns several coin-operated tanning salons. Research has shown that if a customer arrives and there are no beds available, the customer will turn around and leave, thus costing the company a sale. Your task is to write a program that tells the company how many customers left without tanning.
The input consists of data for one or more salons, followed by a line containing the number 0 that signals the end of the input. Data for each salon is a single line containing a positive integer, representing the number of tanning beds in the salon, followed by a space, followed by a sequence of uppercase letters. Letters in the sequence occur in pairs. The first occurrence indicates the arrival of a customer, the second indicates the departure of that same customer. No letter will occur in more than one pair. Customers who leave without tanning always depart before customers who are currently tanning. There are at most 20 beds per salon.
For each salon, output a sentence telling how many customers, if any, walked away. Use the exact format shown below.
Example input:
2 ABBAJJKZKZ 3 GACCBDDBAGEE 3 GACCBGDDBAEE 1 ABCBCA 0 |
Example output:
All customers tanned successfully. 1 customer(s) walked away. All customers tanned successfully. 2 customer(s) walked away. |
Don't forget to complete and submit this lab via the ZyBook interface; a blank template has been provided in the assignment there.
I'll admit that I picked this problem because, superficially, it seemed like the salon behaves sort of like a complex data structure. In reality, however, the easiest way to do this one is just to use arrays and loops, along with a bit of character to integer conversion!
My recommendation for data structures is the following:
bool tanning[26]
An array that notes who is currently in a bed, with tanning[0]
set to true if A is tanning, tanning[1] true if B is tanning,
and so on.
We will rely on the fact that people are represented by the
upper case letters from A to Z and that we can convert those
characters to indices from 0 to 25. Given character value val
the appropriate index is computed as
bool known[26]
Although not entirely necessary, it will be helpful to keep
track of whether you have seen a particular alphabet
symbol in the input (to more easily distinguish between whether
a customer is arriving or departing). Such an array could be
used for this purpose, again using the mapping from characters A
to Z into indicies 0 to 25.
int numTanning
A count of how many people are currently tanning (i.e., how many
beds are full). Admittedly, we could write a loop to count how
many values are set to true in the previous array, but why not
make it even easier.
int numMisses
Count how many times you see a customer at a time when all the
beds are full. The only catch is that such a customer has two
characters in the input sequence, one for when they arrive and
one for when they leave. For now, think of each independently,
thereby marking two misses per such a customer. You can always
make the proper adjustment before outputting the real answer.