Friday, July 24

gene-names

daily challenge16

today's brief

In 2016 a team combed through thousands of genetics papers and found that roughly one in five had corrupted gene names, silently mangled by Excel. Symbols like SEP2 and DEC1 were read as dates and rewritten as 2-Sep or 1-Dec the instant they landed in a cell. The mess was so stubborn that in 2020 the official gene naming committee gave up and renamed the genes to stop it. Spot the ones Excel would eat.

Objective

Return whether a token would be autoconverted to a date: a three letter month followed by digits.

Steps

A token is dangerous when its first three characters are a month abbreviation (JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC), and every character after those three is a digit, with at least one digit present.
Comparisons are case sensitive and uppercase.
Return 1 if the token is dangerous, otherwise 0. A token like MARCH1, whose fourth character is a letter, is not in scope: return 0.

examples

$ excel_mangles("SEP2")

$ excel_mangles("DEC2020")

$ excel_mangles("MARCH1")

Constraints

Expected files

gene.c

Allowed functions

None. Write every helper yourself.

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Solutions

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