Project: Merge Interval

Overview

This is a program to merge interval sequences and output the resulting interval list on the command line. E.g.

[2,23]

[25,30]

The source list of intervals can be a string of intervals like "[25,30] [2,19] [14,23] [4,8]" or it can be a cvs file where each line in the file is an interval. Start and end value is separated by a semicolon. Examples are in the test folder

The software is implemented in C# / .NET 5 and use nunit3 for the unit tests.

PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THE FOCUS WAS ON THE MERGE FUNCTION

There are some places in the code (out of focus) which needs to be improved on testing and error handling

Quickstart

Prerequisites

Download and install .NET SDK

If you just want to start up the application quickly, clone or download the source files, open a command line prompt in the src/MergeInterval folder and type

dotnet run -- --help

This command will display you the program help as you can see it below

MergeInterval 1.0.0
Copyright (C) 2021 MergeInterval

  -c, --csv       (Group: IntervalSource) Read intervals from the specified csv file.Caution filename has to be enclosed
                  with quotation marks

  -s, --string    (Group: IntervalSource) Read intervals the command line.Caution intervals have to be enclosed with
                  quotation marks E.g.: "[25,30] [2,19] [14, 23] [4,8]".

  --help          Display this help screen.

  --version       Display version information.

To get merged intervals use the following statement

dotnet run -- -s "[25,30] [2,19] [14, 23] [4,8]"

This is just for testing and you are running a debug version. To get a distributable binary see the build instructions in the "doc" folder

If you already build a published binary open a command line prompt in the corresponding folder and call for example:

MergeInterval -s "[25,30] [2,19] [14, 23] [4,8]"

External dependencies

The project MergeInterval has an external dependency to CommandLineParser project https://github.com/commandlineparser/commandline to get and parse the command line arguments easily

Figures

To get some insights about the resource consumption, here are some measured value

No of intervals	Memory	CPU	Duration	CSV file size
2 Mio	483 MB	12,4%	3 sec	44,5 MB
20 Mio	5 GB	12,5%	20 sec	444,5 MB

The measurement was done with Jetbrains dotTrace