Question

Let’s say a user inputs Washington Lim who is on the sanctions list. The program needs to match the input name (Washington Lim) with the banned list to see if a match is found, e.g.Washington Lim could also be spelt as Washington Tim. Or while there could be typo while typing the input (user could have interchanged 2 letters e.g. Washingtno Lim). These should also show up as matches / hits. Let’s define 75% match as a hit. “Washington Lim” has 14 characters including the space. If we take only integers then even if 3 characters are incorrect, it should be deemed as a hit. So “Washington Tim" which has only one character incorrect when compared to “Washington Lim” should be returned as a hit.

Assume the Banned list has the following names

• Washington Lim

• Russia

• PETA

Input a name on the command prompt, match it with the above list and return a “Hit” or “No hit” based on a 75% match.

Expected technical output	A Reusable Java program w/ Classes which can used to Identify Payee is Matching against given banned list (List which contains Names of people, Organizations and Countries provided as part of CSV file) and returns with Hit / No with Percentages
Expected user action/input	input name through command line argument OR build a simple rest endpoint in Java
What technical stack	Java Implementation WITH OR WITHOUT Rest endpoint

Answer 1

sol: For the above question we have to check if the entered name belongs to banned list or not. We have to use Java language. The input file will be a csv file that is excel sheet. The output screen can be a rest endpoint or commandline. We shall use command line arguement for simplicity. We have to create a class, have reusable code(function) and output the hit/no hit with percentages.

NOTE: Make sure to save the file name as <classname>.java. Our program classname is Hit so save the file as Hit.java else the program will fail to run. If you want to keep a different file name make sure to change the classname too. If any other errors are encountered in execution please check the JDK version on your device. I am using JDK 8. The excel sheet created is saved as .csv ( comma delimited) format in my system.

CODE:

import java.io.*;
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Hit
{
static int dist(String s1, String s2) //finding distance between strings
{
int i = 0, c = 0, k;
  
if(s1.length()<s2.length())//checking length difference
k=s1.length();//storing smaller length
else
k=s2.length();
while (i < k)
{
if (s1.charAt(i) != s2.charAt(i)) //checking character similarity
c++; //incrementing counter for differences
i++;
}
c=c+(Math.abs(s1.length()-s2.length()));//adding length difference to the counter value and using abs to get magnitude only of negative difference
return c;
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
{
String str;
int k;
double p;
Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File("C:\\Users\\Santanu Karmakar\\Documents\\banlist.csv"));//taking file input
Scanner t=new Scanner(System.in);//creating another scanner object for user input
System.out.println("Enter your name: ");
String s= t.nextLine();
while (sc.hasNextLine()) //as long as file has lines we shall read
{
str=sc.nextLine(); //reading 1 file line
k=dist(s,str);//calling distance function, since it is static we call it without creating object

p=(s.length()-k)/(double)s.length()*100;//k holds difference in characters thats why to get percentage we find (length -k) /length because length-k gives the number of similar characters
if(p>=75.0)//cheching if similarity more than or equals 75%
System.out.println(str+": HIT, percentage match: "+p);//printing hit
else
System.out.println(str+": NO HIT, percentage match: "+p);

}   
sc.close();   
}
}

CODE SNAPSHOT:

INPUT FILE:

EXECUTION:

2 test cases shown.