Challenge #433: Ogden’s Basic English – Making Words Count

[AYXAcademy]

Hi Maveryx,

A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here.

Are you enjoying the new Weekly Challenge page? We hope you've had a chance to read our blog post explaining the exciting new features we've introduced in this latest version. We'd love to hear your thoughts, so please leave us a comment with your feedback!

This week's challenge, created by Motoi Tokimatsu, will test your RegEx skills! Thank you, @Tokimatsu , for presenting this intriguing task.

Have you heard about the 850 words of Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English? (In this context, the acronym BASIC stands for British American Scientific International Commercial.) In his book published in 1930, Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar, he created a list of about 850 words to form the core vocabulary of Basic English. Basic English aims to create an easier and more efficient form of English for international communication, particularly for those learning English as a second language. The reduced vocabulary is designed to cover most everyday situations and needs without the complexity of the full English language.

Your tasks for this challenge include:

1. Download the data from the URL provided.
2. List the words (around 850)
3. Create an index with the first letter of each word.
4. Calculate the number of words that start with each letter of the alphabet.

In this challenge, the Replace and Tokenize functions in RegEx will be your best friends.

Need a refresher? Review the following lessons in Academy to gear up:

• Replacing Data with RegEx
• Splitting Data with RegEx

Good luck!

[Kenda]

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Fun challenge! 

I got a different answer for G & P, but manually counting shows my answer seems to be correct.

(Edit - I got rid of the RecordID tool since that literally wasn't doing anything, but post won't let me upload a new image. Workflow is updated, though.)

[mmontgomery]

C433

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Took a bit to figure out parsing/extraction logic. Mine is slightly different than the answer provided but matches the wiki page sections

[binuacs]

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[Tofel]

Slightly different results to the solution, probably because of these words in brackets, but in total it is 850 words, so it should be good.

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[LindonB]

Fun as always. 

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I find that I usually prefer to use the Python tool and beautifulsoup to parse data, so I always love the practice with the download tool.

[logdog0411]

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Not sure why I'm 1-2 off on some letters. I scanned my list and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. 

[TurboToad]

Always enjoy a good regex problem!

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[RWvanLeeuwen]

here's my take

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I lost a lot of time reading through that boring HTML finding scraps of data, but with a bit help I found the rows I needed... Still, the answers seem a tiny bit off

[Erin]

Excited to see how the RegEx champions solved this - because I am not quite there yet. I didn't use the RegEx tool (Other than parsing, it trips me up), and instead did my RegEx in the formula tool.  

I came up with 852 words vs the suggested output solution that has 856. Tomato, tomato....

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