I recently stumbled upon this fun coding challenge involving the Cha Cha Slide, and it got my brain buzzing! The basic idea is to create a function that takes a list of dance moves from the song and returns an indexed list of those moves, but with a twist. Each move has its own unique way of being referenced, and I just can’t wrap my head around how to implement it efficiently.
So, here’s the gist: you know how the Cha Cha Slide has a lot of repeated phrases? Like, “to the left, take it back now, y’all” and “crisscross”? The goal is to create a neat function that parses through a given set of moves and organizes them so you can easily reference any of them later. You should be able to take a single line of input that could look something like this:
“`
“to the left, take it back now y’all, crisscross, cha cha real smooth, now it’s time to get funky”
“`
And then, the output should give you a creative index where each unique move gets a unique identifier. It would look something like:
“`
0: to the left
1: take it back now y’all
2: crisscross
3: cha cha real smooth
4: now it’s time to get funky
“`
The challenge here is to figure out how to handle duplicate phrases and maintain the order in which they first appear. I’m wondering if anyone has found an efficient way to parse the string and generate this index. Should I use a list or a dictionary? And what about punctuation—should I be cautious about including or ignoring it?
I’ve tried a few different approaches, like iterating through the string and using split to break it down. But, once duplicates come into play, things get a little messy. I would love to see some examples of how you all have tackled this! Maybe there’s a clever solution I haven’t thought of yet. Anyone game to share their methods or tips?
To create a function that indexes unique dance moves from the Cha Cha Slide lyrics while maintaining their order of appearance, you can use a combination of an iterable and a set to track seen phrases. The approach involves splitting the input string into individual moves, iterating through them, and storing each unique move along with its index in a dictionary. Here’s a possible implementation in Python:
This code defines a function `index_moves` that takes a string of moves, processes it, and returns a dictionary where each unique move has its corresponding index. The `split` method is used to separate the moves based on commas followed by a space, ensuring that punctuation is retained as part of the phrases. This way, if there are duplicates, they will not be included multiple times in the resulting index.