New gem - greatest_common_factor
Ruby already provides the ability to find the greatest common factor (gcf) of two integers. What if we could determine the greatest common factor across a whole array of integers? Now we can.
I’ve just released greatest_common_factor on github.
Here is a sample of what you can do with it:
[12,16,8,40].greatest_common_factor => 4
[12,16,8,40].gcf => 4
[12,16,8,40].factored_by_gcf => [3, 4, 2, 10]
Update:
You can now also specify a tolerance for greatest common factor calculations. In many cases, you’ll have data that is so close to having a common factor, but not perfectly.
Let’s see how changing the tolerance can provide a greatest common factor that’s close enough (or as close as you let it be, anyway).
[12,16,8,41].greatest_common_factor => nil
# but, if we add a tolerance of 1
[12,16,8,41].greatest_common_factor(1) => 4
[11,15,9,41].greatest_common_factor => nil
[11,15,9,41].greatest_common_factor(1) => 2
Enjoy!
Thoughts from Twitter
Brian Doll is a business-focused technologist who has been building things on the web for over 13 years. He has extensive experience in retail, media and financial service industries in both start-up and large enterprise environments.
He enjoys speaking on lean engineering, web application performance and systems architecture. Having been inspired by Ruby and reinvigorated by Rails, Brian has been an avid contributor in the Ruby/Rails community since early 2007.
Additionally, he is a husband, father, thought worker, tree-hugging, music-loving, punk, atheist, non-conformist, optimist, Quality seeker. Phew! Here you'll find a mix of thoughts on fitness (Crossfit, Paleo foods), philosophy and programming (Ruby, Rails and other goodies).