similarities

Similarities Instructions

tl;dr

1. Implement a program that compares two files for similarities.
2. Implement a website that highlights similarities across files, a la the below.

Specification

• helpers.py:
  • lines: Implement lines in such a way that, given two strings, a and b, it returns a list of the lines that are, identically, in both a and b. The list should not contain any duplicates. Assume that lines in a and b will be be separated by \n, but the strings in the returned list should not end in \n. If both a and b contain one or more blank lines (i.e., a \n immediately preceded by no other characters), the returned list should include an empty string (i.e., "").
  • sentences: Implement sentences in such a way that, given two strings, a and b, it returns a list of the unique English sentences that are, identically, present in both a and b. The list should not contain any duplicates. Use sent_tokenize from the Natural Language Toolkit to "tokenize" (i.e., separate) each string into a list of sentences. It can be imported with: from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize. Per its documentation, sent_tokenize, given a str as input, returns a list of English sentences therein. It assumes that its input is indeed English text (and not, e.g., code, which might coincidentally have periods too).
  • substrings: Implement substrings in such a way that, given two strings, a and b, and an integer, n, it returns a list of all substrings of length n that are, identically, present in both a and b. The list should not contain any duplicates. Recall that a substring of length n of some string is just a sequence of n characters from that string. For instance, if n is 2 and the string is Yale, there are three possible substrings of length 2: Ya, al, and le. Meanwhile, if n is 1 and the string is Harvard, there are seven possible substrings of length 1: H, a, r, v, a, r, and d. But once we eliminate duplicates, there are only five unique substrings: H, a, r, v, a, r, and d.
• templates/index.html: Implement templates/index.html in such a way that it contains an HTML form via which a user can submit:
  • a file called file1
  • a file called file2
  • a value of lines, sentences, or substrings for an input called algorithm
  • a number called length

Full instructions available here