Pather Problem

Several weeks ago I was asked to complete a programming challenge for a potential job. The job was for a web development company where I would be doing a combination of back-end PHP development and front-end GUI work with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. So it was a bit of a surprise that the programming challenge had nothing to do with web development. Rather it was an algorithm problem and one that I didn't feel was all that challenging. Of course, after submitting the work, I was told they were going to look at other people for the position. So there’s the possibility that I missed some corner case in my solution. Anyhow, I figured I shouldn't let that hour or two of thinking and programming go to waste.

So I've posted my solution and its associated files on my GitHub account.

In this challenge, the input is a square grid with some number of hash marks (#). The goal is to connect the hash marks with splats (*). The instructions stated that no diagonal lines were allowed and, when a choice is available, a line must be drawn vertically before horizontally. A couple examples are shown below:

If you are interested in my solution to the problem, you can visit the code on my GitHub page. If you see any glaring errors, I’d love to hear them.