TL;DR

Here we are with TASK #1 from The Weekly Challenge #185. Enjoy!

The challenge

You are given MAC address in the form i.e. hhhh.hhhh.hhhh.

Write a script to convert the address in the form hh:hh:hh:hh:hh:hh.

Example 1

Input:  1ac2.34f0.b1c2
Output: 1a:c2:34:f0:b1:c2

Example 2

Input:  abc1.20f1.345a
Output: ab:c1:20:f1:34:5a

The questions

Uh… I guess none! Well…

• MAC is the Media Access Control address, right?
• h represents a hex digit, right?

The solution

In Raku we’re using comb to focus on the characters that we need, taking two at a time (without the input validation):

#!/usr/bin/env raku
use v6;
sub MAIN (Str $s = '1ac2.34f0.b1c2') { put MAC-address($s) }
sub MAC-address ($x) { $x.comb(rx:i/<[ a..f 0..9 ]> ** 2/).join(':') }

We can do pretty much the same using a global match in Perl:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
printf "%s\n", MAC_address(shift // '1ac2.34f0.b1c2');
sub MAC_address { join ':', shift =~ m{([a-f0-9]{2})}igmxs }

I know… I removed strict and warnings… please forgive me and stay safe!