Normalize

ApartmentList normalize interview challenge

== BEGIN PROBLEM ==

Please write a method to normalize a string which represents a file path. For the purposes of this question, normalizing means:

• all single dot components of the path must be removed. For example, "foo/./bar" should be normalized to "foo/bar".
• all double dots components of the path must be removed, along with their parent directory, if any. For example, "foo/bar/../baz" should be normalized to "foo/baz".

That's it. Normally, a path normalization algorithm would do a lot of other stuff, but for this question, don't do any other kind of normalization or transformation of the path. As an example, "foo//bar" should be normalized to "foo//bar" (i.e. a no-op).

We suggest that you write the code in Ruby, but you can use any programming language. Please write code that you feel proud of and would check in to source control and push into production use in a professional environment. You program should read paths from standard input and write normalized paths on a standard output (this is important, as you solution will be auto-graded).

Please send us a GitHub link for the solution, and make sure that project has a README file with instructions on how to run your code.

== END PROBLEM ==

To run this code simply download it, and run it with ruby. It will prompt the user to type in a path and then it will print out the corresponding normalized path

You could also run this code in your terminal:

git clone git://github.com/wesdotcool/normalize.git &&
ruby normalize/normalize.rb

This code will treat multiple slashes 'foo//bar' as directories. As in: 'foo/baz/bar' is the same thing as 'foo//bar' but the middle directory's name is 'baz' in the first instance, and '' in the second. Therefore something like: 'foo//../bar' will normalize to 'foo/bar'