Elegance is in the eye of the beholder, of course - a state machine is easier to code in K than in almost any other language, and is likely the most elegant overall solution.
A common kludgy solution you’d see would probably be to delete or zero out characters that shouldn’t be counted, and then do the original thing; some would consider that elegant and others won’t.
There are many examples if you look for them, many well explained, e.g. https://nsl.com ; the problem is APL/K is almost as different from C/Java as Japanese is from English ; there’s no amount of chewing anyone will do for you that will save you from going deep, and if you’ve decided to go deep, the material is already available.
Sounds good, I love state machines and I often write them in C where other people would just go with ad-hoc loops and branches and temporaries. I'll keep an eye out for examples..
Recently there was a link on simdjson, a C++ parser for JSON which aims to be record fast. It uses vector instructions of modern processes, but if you'll watch the video presentation, Daniel Lemire will also explain how they handle finding string boundaries - with all those escapes needed - without branching, purely logical operations.
Could be a good example for how APL approaches things.
A common kludgy solution you’d see would probably be to delete or zero out characters that shouldn’t be counted, and then do the original thing; some would consider that elegant and others won’t.
There are many examples if you look for them, many well explained, e.g. https://nsl.com ; the problem is APL/K is almost as different from C/Java as Japanese is from English ; there’s no amount of chewing anyone will do for you that will save you from going deep, and if you’ve decided to go deep, the material is already available.