Thursday, May 29, 2008

Google Treasure Hunt 2008 - Question 2

This is a continuation of my solutions to Google's treasure hunt. My post on question 1 can be found here.

The Question:
Here is a random zip archive for you to download:
GoogleTreasureHunt08_123456123456123456.zip

Unzip the archive, then process the resulting files to obtain a numeric result. You'll be taking the sum of lines from files matching a certain description, and multiplying those sums together to obtain a final result. Note that files have many different extensions, like '.pdf' and '.js', but all are plain text files containing a small number of lines of text.

Sum of line 2 for all files with path or name containing foo and ending in .xml
Sum of line 4 for all files with path or name containing mno and ending in .pdf
Hint: If the requested line does not exist, do not increment the sum.

Multiply all the above sums together and enter the product below.

Well this question begs for a [program,script,bash stmt] to be written. It doesn't even begin to make sense to do this manually..

Here's my Java source: http://b22222.com/files/GoogleQuestion2.java
One just needs to modify the set of rules and the location of the unzipped folder.

I just posted my answer for question 3; I have to wait 8 hours for the result! Oh well, fingers crossed.

Happy Googling!

1 comment:

clecuret said...

If you want to play with other software challenge, I propose that you try YASC (Yet Another Software Challenge : http://software.challenge.googlepages.com/) which is a site of one of my colleague.
It's inspired of Python challenge but more based on software culture than python tutorial