FloorLayout | Topcoder Archive

Problem Statement

You are building a house and are about to lay the floorboards in a particular room. Your architect has designed the layout of the floorboards and you now want to know how many boards you need to buy. Each board is 1 unit wide and can be of any positive integer length. The room is rectangular and the boards are to be laid out on a unit-square grid inside the room, parallel to the walls of the room.

You are given a String[] layout describing the layout of the floorboards. Character j of element i of layout describes the grid-square at position (i, j) and will either be a '-' or a '|', depending on which direction the floorboard covering that square is oriented. If two '-' characters are adjacent at the same value of i, then they form part of the same east/west-oriented floorboard. Similarly, if two '|' characters are adjacent at the same value of j, they are part of the same north/south-oriented floorboard. Return an int containing the number of distinct floorboards in the layout.

Definition

Class:: FloorLayout
Method:: countBoards
Parameters:: String[]
Returns:: int
Method signature:: int countBoards(String[] layout)
(be sure your method is public)

Constraints

layout will contain between 1 and 50 elements, inclusive.
Each element of layout will contain between 1 and 50 characters, inclusive.
Each element of layout will contain the same number of characters.
Each character in layout will be a '-' or a '|'.

Examples

```
{"----"
,"----"
,"----"
,"----"}
```
```
Returns: 4
```
This layout contains 4 boards laid east/west.

{"-||--||--"
,"--||--||-"
,"|--||--||"
,"||--||--|"
,"-||--||--"
,"--||--||-"}

Returns: 31

This is an aesthetic pattern made up of boards of lengths 1 and 2.

{"--------"
,"|------|"
,"||----||"
,"|||--|||"
,"||----||"
,"|------|"
,"--------"}

Returns: 13

{"||-||-|||-"
,"||--||||||"
,"-|-|||||||"
,"-|-||-||-|"
,"||--|-||||"
,"||||||-||-"
,"|-||||||||"
,"||||||||||"
,"||---|--||"
,"-||-||||||"}

Returns: 41

{"-||--|"
,"||||||"
,"|||-|-"
,"-||||-"
,"||||-|"
,"||-||-"}

Returns: 19

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