DataFilter | Topcoder Archive

Problem Statement

Name, age, and id. That is the information that we are supposed to have for all our workers, but what we have is a mess. Our data is a collection of records, but some workers have multiple records, and some of the records are missing some of the information. We would like to untangle the mess. At least, we would like to figure out how many different workers we have!

Each worker has his own unique id that is a string of digits, the first of which is always zero ('0'). Each worker has a name consisting of uppercase letters 'A'-'Z', and has an age that is an integer with no leading zeros. Neither name nor age can be relied upon to be unique. Each data record contains information for a single worker, and is formatted to contain no leading or trailing spaces. It may contain 1, 2, or all 3 of the fields (name, age, id) in any order. The fields within a record will be separated by one or more spaces.

Create a class DataFilter that contains a method untangle that is given a String[] data that contains the records and returns the number of different workers we have.

Each element of data consists of one or more records, separated from each other by a single semicolon (';'). If there is more than one way to untangle the data, return the smallest possible number of workers. If there is no consistent interpretation of the data, return -1.

Definition

Class:: DataFilter
Method:: untangle
Parameters:: String[]
Returns:: int
Method signature:: int untangle(String[] data)
(be sure your method is public)

Notes

Ids should be treated as strings, not numbers.

Constraints

data will contain between 1 and 50 elements inclusive.
Each element of data will contain between 1 and 50 characters inclusive.
Each element of data will consist of 1 or more records, separated from each other by a single ';'
Each record in each element of data will contain no leading or trailing spaces.
Each record will contain exactly 1, 2, or 3 fields separated by (possibly multiple) spaces.
No record will contain more than one age, name, or id.
Each age will be between 1 and 150 inclusive, and will not have a leading '0'
Each id will contain between 1 and 10 characters inclusive, all digits and having a leading '0'
Each name will contain between 1 and 10 characters inclusive, all uppercase letters 'A'-'Z'

Examples

```
{"BOB      22 013","17 BOB;22","0234","16"} 
```
```
Returns: 3
```
data consists of 5 records (one of the elements of data contains 2 records, separated by a ';'). One of the records has all 3 fields, one of the records has 2 fields, and the other records each have just a single field. There are at least 3 different workers since there are 3 different ages. [BOB 22 013],[BOB 17 0234],[TOM 16 099] is one possibility that is consistent with these 5 data records.
```
{"2 01;02 B;B;B 02;2 02;C   02"}
```
```
Returns: -1
```
One record has the employee with id 02 being named B, while another record claims that 02 is named C. So these records are inconsistent.
```
{"A 21","B 21","B 23","A 23","01 A","02 21","B 03","04 B"}
```
```
Returns: 4
```
One way to untangle these 8 records into just 4 employees is [A 23 01], [B 21 03], [B 23 04], [A 21 02].
```
{"96;DJG 00 88;EFD 88"}
```
```
Returns: 3
```
```
{"00 BOB 22","0 BOB 22"}
```
```
Returns: 2
```
Id's 0 and 00 are different, so these two cannot be combined.

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