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Implement an ASCII Art Printer

AsanaSoftware Engineer · Onsite
MediumSoftware EngineerOnsiteCoding & Algorithms

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This question evaluates the ability to implement text rendering and string/array manipulation concepts, including glyph concatenation with inter-character spacing, newline-preserved blocks, blank glyph rendering for spaces, and handling of unsupported characters.

Implement an ASCII art printer.

A font defines each supported character as a glyph with the same height. A glyph is a list of equal-length text rows. Given an input string and the font, return the rendered ASCII-art output.

Requirements:

  • Render characters by concatenating corresponding glyph rows horizontally.
  • Insert one blank column between adjacent characters on the same input line.
  • Preserve newline characters in the input by starting a new block of glyph rows.
  • Render a space character as a blank glyph of the font height.
  • For an unsupported character, either return an error or render a configured placeholder; document your choice.
  • Do not print directly to stdout; return the final string or list of lines.

Example font of height 3:

CharacterRow 1Row 2Row 3
A## ####
B## # ###

Input AB with one-column spacing renders:

# ## # # # # ### ##

Constraints: let S be the total number of characters in the rendered output. The implementation should run in O(S) time.