"""Develop a method to express Roman numerals in minimal form. The rules for writing Roman numerals allow for many ways of writing each number (see FAQ: Roman Numerals). However, there is always a "best" way of writing a particular number. For example, the following represent all of the legitimate ways of writing the number sixteen: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII VIIIIIIIIIII VVIIIIII XIIIIII VVVI XVI The last example being considered the most efficient, as it uses the least number of numerals. The 11K text file, roman.txt (p089/roman.txt), contains one thousand numbers written in valid, but not necessarily minimal, Roman numerals; that is, they are arranged in descending units and obey the subtractive pair rule (see FAQ for the definitive rules for this problem). Find the number of characters saved by writing each of these in their minimal form. Note: You can assume that all the Roman numerals in the file contain no more than four consecutive identical units. """ ROMAN_NUMERALS = { 'I': 1, 'V': 5, 'X': 10, 'L': 50, 'C': 100, 'D': 500, 'M': 1000 } def roman_to_decimal(s): # Read in roman digits in reverse last = None total = 0 for c in s[::-1]: val = ROMAN_NUMERALS[c] if last and val < last: total = total - val else: total = total + val last = val return total def decimal_to_roman(n): roman = '' lookup = dict([(v, k) for (k, v) in ROMAN_NUMERALS.iteritems()]) values = sorted(ROMAN_NUMERALS.values()) total = 0 subtracted = False for i in xrange(len(values)): val = values[i] if val == max(values): count = n // val roman = (lookup[val] * count) + roman else: nn = (n - total) % values[i + 1] count = nn // val if count > 3: roman = lookup[val] + lookup[values[i + 2]] + roman subtracted = True else: if count and subtracted: count = count - 1 subtracted = False roman = (lookup[val] * count) + roman total = total + nn return roman def main(): saved = 0 with open('p089/roman.txt', 'r') as f: while True: line = f.readline() if not line: break old = line.strip() new = decimal_to_roman(roman_to_decimal(old)) print roman_to_decimal(old), old, new saved = saved + (len(old) - len(new)) print 'Saved:', saved if __name__ == '__main__': main()