Vowel Skewers

Challenge Difficulty: Medium | Estimated completion time: ~25 minutes

An authentic vowel skewer is a skewer with a delicious and juicy mix of consonants and vowels. However, the way they are made must be just right:

• Skewers must begin and end with a consonant.
• Skewers must alternate between consonants and vowels.
• There must be an even spacing between each letter on the skewer, so that there is a consistent flavour throughout.

Create a function which returns whether a given vowel skewer is authentic.

Examples

is_authentic_skewer("B--A--N--A--N--A--S")
output = True
 
is_authentic_skewer("A--X--E")
output = False
# Should start and end with a consonant.
 
is_authentic_skewer("C-L-A-P")
output = False
# Should alternate between consonants and vowels.
 
is_authentic_skewer("M--A---T-E-S")
output = False
# Should have consistent spacing between letters.

Solution

Python

def is_authentic_skewer(skewer: str) -> bool: """ Determine if a vowel skewer is authentic. An authentic skewer must: - Begin and end with a consonant - Alternate between consonants and vowels - Have even spacing (consistent number of dashes) between each letter Args: skewer: String representing a vowel skewer with letters and dashes. Returns: True if the skewer is authentic, False otherwise. Examples: >>> is_authentic_skewer("B--A--N--A--N--A--S") True >>> is_authentic_skewer("A--X--E") False """ vowels = "AEIOUaeiou" # Extract letters and their positions letters = [] positions = [] for index, char in enumerate(skewer): if char.isalpha(): letters.append(char) positions.append(index) if len(letters) < 2: return False # Check if starts and ends with consonant if letters[0] in vowels or letters[-1] in vowels: return False # Check alternating pattern for index in range(len(letters) - 1): current_is_vowel = letters[index] in vowels next_is_vowel = letters[index + 1] in vowels if current_is_vowel == next_is_vowel: return False # Check consistent spacing spacings = [] for index in range(len(positions) - 1): spacing = positions[index + 1] - positions[index] spacings.append(spacing) if len(set(spacings)) > 1: return False return True if __name__ <span class="text-highlight"> "__main__": # Test cases assert is_authentic_skewer("B--A--N--A--N--A--S") </span> True assert is_authentic_skewer("A--X--E") <span class="text-highlight"> False assert is_authentic_skewer("C-L-A-P") </span> False assert is_authentic_skewer("M--A---T-E-S") <span class="text-highlight"> False assert is_authentic_skewer("T-O-M-A-T-O") </span> True print("All test cases passed!")

Output