// // Another useful practice for bit manipulation is setting bits as flags. // This is especially useful when processing lists of something and storing // the states of the entries, e.g. a list of numbers and for each prime // number a flag is set. // // As an example, let's take the Pangram exercise from Exercism: // https://exercism.org/tracks/zig/exercises/pangram // // A pangram is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once. // It is case insensitive, so it doesn't matter if a letter is lower-case // or upper-case. The best known English pangram is: // // "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." // // There are several ways to select the letters that appear in the pangram // (and it doesn't matter if they appear once or several times). // // For example, you could take an array of bool and set the value to 'true' // for each letter in the order of the alphabet (a=0; b=1; etc.) found in // the sentence. However, this is neither memory efficient nor particularly // fast. Instead we take a simpler way, very similar in principle, we define // a variable with at least 26 bits (e.g. u32) and also set the bit for each // letter found at the corresponding position. // // Zig provides functions for this in the standard library, but we prefer to // solve it without these extras, after all we want to learn something. // const std = @import("std"); const ascii = std.ascii; const print = std.debug.print; pub fn main() !void { // let's check the pangram print("Is this a pangram? {?}!\n", .{isPangram("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.")}); } fn isPangram(str: []const u8) bool { // first we check if the string has at least 26 characters if (str.len < 26) return false; // we uses a 32 bit variable of which we need 26 bits var bits: u32 = 0; // loop about all characters in the string for (str) |c| { // if the character is an alphabetical character if (ascii.isASCII(c) and ascii.isAlphabetic(c)) { // then we set the bit at the position // // to do this, we use a little trick: // since the letters in the ASCI table start at 65 // and are numbered sequentially, we simply subtract the // first letter (in this case the 'a') from the character // found, and thus get the position of the desired bit bits |= @as(u32, 1) << @truncate(u5, ascii.toLower(c) - 'a'); } } // last we return the comparison if all 26 bits are set, // and if so, we know the given string is a pangram // // but what do we have to compare? return bits == 0x..???; }