Verifying leftPad() in Whiley

The leftPad(string,int) function simply pads a string up to a given size by inserted spaces at the beginning. For example, leftPad("hello",8) produces " hello" . This little function shot to fame in 2016 when a developer pulled all his modules from NPM, of which one provided the leftPad() functionality. There were two basic issues causing surprise here: firstly, a developer can suddenly and without warning pull all his libraries (including old versions), thereby breaking anything depending on them (which, in this case, was a lot). secondly, that someone was providing a module to offer this (pretty basic) functionality.

Anyhow, that is all ancient history. A bunch of people have been writing verified implementations of leftPad() in various languages. And, @Hillelolgram asked if I would write one in Whiley:

So, having little spare time, I thought I’d give it a crack. Here’s my first version:

import string from std::ascii import char from std::ascii import std::array function leftPad(string str, int n) -> (string result) // Required padding cannot be negative requires n >= |str| // Returned array increased to size n ensures |result| == n // First elements are padding ensures all { i in 0 .. (n-|str|) | result[i] == ' '} // Everything else copied from original ensures all { i in 0 .. |str| | result[i+(n-|str|)] == str[i] }: // Calculate how much padding required int padding = n - |str| // Create new string of final length string nstr = [' '; n] // Copy over everthing from old string return array::copy(str,0,nstr,padding,|str|)

This is nice and short and makes use of the standard library. But, sadly, for reasons unknown I could not get this to pass verification. Since I already had a resize() method in the standard library and I knew this verified, I figured I could work from that instead. Here’s version two (after some faffing around):

function leftPad(string str, int size) -> (string result) // Required padding cannot be negative requires size >= |str| // Returned array increased to size ensures |result| == size // First n elements are padding ensures all { i in 0 .. (size-|str|) | result[i] == ' '} // Everything else copied from original ensures all { i in 0 .. |str| | result[i+(size-|str|)] == str[i] }: // int padding = size - |str| string nstr = [' '; size] int i = 0 // while i < |str| where i >= 0 && |nstr| == size // All elements up to i copied over where all { j in 0..i | nstr[j+padding] == str[j] } // Untouched str are still padding where all { j in 0..padding | nstr[j] == ' ' }: // nstr[i+padding] = str[i] i = i + 1 // return nstr

Essentially, I’ve inlined the call to array::copy() . And, yes, this verifies!! Unfortunately, you can’t verify it on whileylabs.com at the moment because it times out. But, you can do it using WhileyWeb or the command-line compiler.

Whilst it’s great that it does indeed verify, what’s less great is the faffing around I needed to get it through…