The challenge

Given a lowercase string that has alphabetic characters only and no spaces, return the highest value of consonant substrings. Consonants are any letters of the alphabet except "aeiou".

We shall assign the following values: a = 1, b = 2, c = 3, .... z = 26.

For example, for the word “zodiacs”, let’s cross out the vowels. We get: “z o d ia cs”

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-- The consonant substrings are: "z", "d" and "cs" and the values are z = 26, d = 4 and cs = 3 + 19 = 22. The highest is 26.
solve("zodiacs") = 26

For the word "strength", solve("strength") = 57
-- The consonant substrings are: "str" and "ngth" with values "str" = 19 + 20 + 18 = 57 and "ngth" = 14 + 7 + 20 + 8 = 49. The highest is 57.

The solution in Java code

Option 1:

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import java.util.stream.*;
import java.util.*;

public class ConsonantValue {
    public static int solve(final String s) {
        return  Arrays.stream(s.split("[aeiou]+"))
                .mapToInt(t->t.chars().sum()-t.length()*96)
                .max()
                .getAsInt();
    }
}

Option 2:

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public class ConsonantValue {
    public static int solve(final String s) {
        int sum = 0, maxsum = 0;
        char[] arr = s.toCharArray();
        for (char c : arr) {
            if ("aeiou".indexOf(c)>=0) sum = 0;
            else {
                sum += c-'a'+1;
                maxsum = Math.max(sum, maxsum);
            }
        }
        return maxsum;
    }
}

Option 3:

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class ConsonantValue {
  static int solve(String s) {
    int max = 0;
    for (var sil : s.replaceAll("[aeiou]", " ").split(" ")) {
      int value = sil.chars().map(c -> c - 96).sum();
      if (max < value) max = value;
    }
    return max;
  }
}

Test cases to validate our solution

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import org.junit.Test;

public class SampleTest {
    @Test
    public void basicTests() {
        Tester.doTest("zodiac", 26);
        Tester.doTest("chruschtschov", 80);
        Tester.doTest("khrushchev", 38);
        Tester.doTest("strength", 57);
        Tester.doTest("catchphrase", 73);
        Tester.doTest("twelfthstreet", 103);
        Tester.doTest("mischtschenkoana", 80);
    }
}