TopCoder problem "VLNString" used in SRM 226 (Division II Level One)



Problem Statement

    

An acronym is a sequence of characters that is used to refer to something with a very long name. An acronym is generated from a long name by capitalizing the first letter of every word in the name and concatenating them together. There are three exceptions: the common words "and", "the", and "of" are ignored when generating the acronym. In this problem, a word is defined as one or more non-space characters preceded by either a space or the beginning of the string and followed by either a space or the end of the string. Write a class VLNString with a method makeAcronym that takes a String longName and returns a String with its acronym generated as described above.

 

Definition

    
Class:VLNString
Method:makeAcronym
Parameters:String
Returns:String
Method signature:String makeAcronym(String longName)
(be sure your method is public)
    
 

Notes

-longName may contain leading and trailing spaces, and there may be more than one space between words.
-The return value may be an empty string.
 

Constraints

-longName will contain between 1 and 50 characters, inclusive.
-longName will contain only lowercase English letters ('a' to 'z') and space characters.
 

Examples

0)
    
"dance dance revolution"
Returns: "DDR"
1)
    
"  return  of  the king   "
Returns: "RK"
2)
    
"the united states of america"
Returns: "USA"
3)
    
" of  the   and    "
Returns: ""
4)
    
" "
Returns: ""

Problem url:

http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=problem_statement&pm=3489

Problem stats url:

http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=ProblemDetail&rd=6515&pm=3489

Writer:

the_one_smiley

Testers:

PabloGilberto , lbackstrom , brett1479

Problem categories:

String Manipulation, String Parsing