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[2023 Day 4] Difficulty is all over the place
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Advent Of Code
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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev! Other challenges are also welcome!
Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
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Day 1 wasn't so bad, depending on approach. People got tripped up hard with replacing strings because of the old "twone." If you didn't happen to do string replacements it wasn't so bad.
Day 3 absolutely wrecked me though - and my overall rank was still pretty significantly better than it had been on days 1 and 2.
On the flip side, twone absolutely ruined my life. Worst part was that I was looking at it and thinking "yes I handled that edge case and am only taking the first number, why's it not working"
Everything else has been a breeze. I'm using typescript and it's been chill.
Yeah. I was using regex to find the numbers as a quick implementation before realizing that floor. Just switched it to use a positive lookahead to solve that issue.
Day 3 was one of those challenges that if you thought of a good method quickly it wasn't too bad. Ended up compiling strings and using regex again. Worked really well actually.
Not only replacing didn't work. I did it as a regex, but Rusts regex crate only supports non-overlapping matches.
Python's
realso only supports non-overlapping matches and only one direction, so what I did wasspoiler
I looked for the first digit/word using the regex. Then for the last digit/word, I inverted the string and the regex (so I was matching the words eno, owt, eerht, etc.) and took the first occurence, and inverted that in case it was a word, and then I had my last digit. I just had to pay attention to only include the|\dafter inverting the regex, sinced\|is not right.Oh, nice.
I just replaced those compounded words with their non-overlapping counterparts.
Oh, cool, I did pretty much the same thing, just finding the words manually instead (didn’t want to use any external libraries, so I just wrote a function to search for me. Haskell doesn’t have much for OOT B functionality).