Base data structures, algorithms and utility function

This project contains a set of base data structures, algorithms and utility functions which are used in several other projects. These components have been developed to be generic and of wide applicability. When an implementation of a component in this project has subsequently become available in the JDK, it should be deprecated in favour of the JDK implementation.

Install

To use through Maven, include the following dependency in your pom.xml file:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.vikmad</groupId>
  <artifactId>base</artifactId>
  <version>0.1.9</version>
</dependency>

or in Gradle, add the following line to your dependencies list in your build.gradle file:

compile "com.vikmad:base:0.1.9"

Components and example usage

Following are overview of the some of the components in this project. More detailed information is available in the javadocs.

Fast and simple streaming-read of XML files

The ma.vi.base.xml.XmlReader class provides a simplified iterator interface to a streaming XML parser with support for backtracking to an arbitrary number of steps, specified in the constructor or, better, through ma.vi.base.xml.XmlReaderBuilder. XmlReader is an iterator of Fragment with each Fragment carrying information on its type (e.g. element start, element end, comment, text, etc.) and content. Example use:

XmlReader xml = XmlReaderBuilder.newBuilder(new StringReader(xmlText))
                     .discardInterElementSpaces(false)   // do not discard spaces between elements
                     .discardComments(false)             // do not discard comments
                     .rewindCapacity(10)                 // allow rewinding up to 10 positions back
                     .build();
for (Fragment fragment: xml) {
    // do something with the fragment
}

Tuples

ma.vi.base.tuple.T1 to ma.vi.base.tuple.T5 are one to five elements tuples inheriting from a common interface and intended as a convenience when a function need to return several values. Tuples with more components can be created by subclassing the AbstractTuple class or implementing the Tuple interface.

Tries

ma.vi.base.trie.Trie is a generic Trie structure which can be used to implement tries with any sequence types. The StringTrie subclass implements the classic tries on strings and the PathTrie subclass extends this concept to paths which are sequence of path elements (files and folders).

Union-Find

ma.vi.base.unionfind.UnionFind is a generic implementation of the union-find structure backed by as hashmap with implementing path-compression. This structure represents a set of disjoint sets with operations to find and merge sets in amortized constant time.

String escaping and utilities

ma.vi.base.string.Escape can be used to find and escape and unescape certain characters in strings. It is useful when parsing certain arbitrary character sequences. It works by temporarily mapping the set of denoted special characters to the unicode private area and remapping them back to unescape. ma.vi.base.string.Strings contains static functions to generate random strings and to, otherwise, manipulate strings.

ma.vi.base.crypt.Obfuscator can obfuscate phrases which need to be stored or transmitted in some form other than plain text. This is not an encryption function as it does not use a key; it merely manipulates the characters in the text and inject certain random characters to obscure the original phrase in a manner that it can be revealed with a reverse function.

Reflection

ma.vi.base.reflect.Dissector uses Java reflection to provide access to the different elements of a class. ma.vi.base.reflect.Property is an abstraction of fields and properties (get and set accessors) allowing their values to be read and written irrespective of how they are implemented (as private field with or without accessors).

Collections

ma.vi.base.collections.DiskBasedCollection is an ordered collection of objects that is transparently stored on disk allowing it to grow to huge size with minimal impact on RAM. The objects are stored in two files on disk, with an index file containing pointers to a data file. The index file is structured as a self-balancing AA tree and both files are accessed through ma.vi.base.cache.CachedRandomAccessFile which optimizes read and write access to random-access files.

The ma.vi.base.collections package contains other classes which facilitates working with maps, sets, arrays, etc.