Find if all letters in a string are unique - ruby

Question

I need to know if all letters in a string are unique. For a string to be unique, a letter can only appear once. If all letters in a string are distinct, the string is unique. If one letter appears multiple times, the string is not unique.
"Cwm fjord veg balks nth pyx quiz."
# => All 26 letters are used only once. This is unique
"This is a string"
# => Not unique, i and s are used more than once
"two"
# => unique, each letter is shown only once
I tried writing a function that determines whether or not a string is unique.
def unique_characters(string)
for i in ('a'..'z')
if string.count(i) > 1
puts "This string is unique"
else
puts "This string is not unique"
end
end
unique_characters("String")
I receive the output
"This string is unique" 26 times.
Edit:
I would like to humbly apologize for including an incorrect example in my OP. I did some research, trying to find pangrams, and assumed that they would only contain 26 letters. I would also like to thank you guys for pointing out my error. After that, I went on wikipedia to find a perfect pangram (I wrongly thought the others were perfect).
Here is the link for reference purposes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pangrams#Perfect_pangrams_in_English_.2826_letters.29
Once again, my apologies.

Answer 1

s = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
.downcase
("a".."z").all?{|c| s.count(c) <= 1}
# => false
Another way to do it is:
s = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
(s.downcase !~ /([a-z]).*\1/)
# => false

Answer 2

I would solve this in two steps: 1) extract the letters 2) check if there are duplicates:
letters = string.scan(/[a-z]/i) # append .downcase to ignore case
letters.length == letters.uniq.length

Answer 3

Here is a method that does not convert the string to an array:
def dupless?(str)
str.downcase.each_char.with_object('') { |c,s|
c =~ /[a-z]/ && s.include?(c) ? (return false) : s << c }
true
end
dupless?("Cwm fjord veg balks nth pyx quiz.") #=> true
dupless?("This is a string.") #=> false
dupless?("two") #=> true
dupless?("Two tubs") #=> false

Answer 4

If you want to actually keep track of the duplicate characters:
def is_unique?(string)
# Remove whitespaces
string = string.gsub(/\s+/, "")
# Build a hash counting all occurences of each characters
h = Hash.new { |hash, key| hash[key] = 0 }
string.chars.each { |c| h[c] += 1 }
# An array containing all the repetitions
res = h.keep_if {|k, c| c > 1}.keys
if res.size == 0
puts "All #{string.size} characters are used only once. This is unique"
else
puts "Not unique #{res.join(', ')} are used more than once"
end
end
is_unique?("This is a string") # Not unique i, s are used more than once
is_unique?("two") # All 3 characters are used only once. This is unique

Answer 5

To check if a string is unique or not, you can try out this:
string_input.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z]/, '').split("").sort.join('') == ('a' .. 'z').to_a.join('')
This will return true, if all the characters in your string are unique and if they include all the 26 characters.

Answer 6

def has_uniq_letters?(str)
letters = str.gsub(/[^A-Za-z]/, '').chars
letters == letters.uniq
end
If this doesn't have to be case sensitive,
def has_uniq_letters?(str)
letters = str.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z]/, '').chars
letters == letters.uniq
end

Answer 7

In your example, you mentioned you wanted additional information about your string (list of unique characters, etc), so this example may also be useful to you.
# s = "Cwm fjord veg balks nth pyx quiz."
s = "This is a test string."
totals = Hash.new(0)
s.downcase.each_char { |c| totals[c] += 1 if ('a'..'z').cover?(c) }
duplicates, uniques = totals.partition { |k, v| v > 1 }
duplicates, uniques = Hash[duplicates], Hash[uniques]
# duplicates = {"t"=>4, "i"=>3, "s"=>4}
# uniques = {"h"=>1, "a"=>1, "e"=>1, "r"=>1, "n"=>1, "g"=>1}