Run Length Encoding

Implement run-length encoding and decoding.

Run-length encoding (RLE) is a simple form of data compression, where runs (consecutive data elements) are replaced by just one data value and count.

For example we can represent the original 53 characters with only 13.

"WWWWWWWWWWWWBWWWWWWWWWWWWBBBWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWB"  ->  "12WB12W3B24WB"

RLE allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data, which makes it a lossless data compression.

"AABCCCDEEEE"  ->  "2AB3CD4E"  ->  "AABCCCDEEEE"

For simplicity, you can assume that the unencoded string will only contain the letters A through Z (either lower or upper case) and whitespace. This way data to be encoded will never contain any numbers and numbers inside data to be decoded always represent the count for the following character.

Debugging

• Put require Logger at the top of the RunLengthEncoding module.
• Log values to the terminal using Logger.debug inspect <variable>.
• Use the interactive shell to try out things by running iex -S mix.
• In iex you can reload your module using r RunLengthEncoding

Running tests

Execute the tests with:

$ mix test

Pending tests

In the test suites, all but the first test have been skipped.

Once you get a test passing, you can unskip the next one by commenting out the relevant @tag :pending with a # symbol.

For example:

# @tag :pending
test "shouting" do
  assert Bob.hey("WATCH OUT!") == "Whoa, chill out!"
end

Or, you can enable all the tests by commenting out the ExUnit.configure line in the test/test_helper file.

# ExUnit.configure exclude: :pending, trace: true

You can also run all tests by running:

mix test --include pending

Resources

• Installing Elixir
• Getting Started Guide
• Elixir Docs

More specific:

• Guide/Basic types
• Guide/Pattern matching
• Guide/case
• Guide/Modules and functions
• Guide/Recursion
• Docs/Strings
• Docs/Integer

Even more specific hints (links to functions):

• Function
• Function
• Function
• Function

Source

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding

Adapted from the Exercism Elixir Track.