[2023 Day 3] Motivation time!

I thought Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had done something scandalous at first reading

2D grids and parsing data from them in all manner of interesting ways is a real AoC staple.

I'm still hoping to be met with a problem at some point which can be solved by handling it as a type of funge program.

I think the best description I saw was "Advent of Parsing"

So far I've usually had success with just going for regex, but the second challenge today bacfired quite spectacullary. I'm still postponing having to rewrite my solution, because unfortunately it's not really possible to have 2D regex (as far as I know, would be awesome).

I guess just going with some kind of flood algorithm will be the way to go, but that's effort

Day one really got me with those pesky overlapping words like eightwo or twone.

Today was actually really easy the way I did it.
I searched through all the characters of the lines and when I got one that wasn't a number or a period, I looked at all the 8 places around to find the numbers. The numbers I completed by looking in both directions until I got a non-number.
Then I put all numbers and their starting positions in an array, deleted the duplicates and summed them.

By doing this, question 2 only took me 4 minutes.

I don't want to read the number string from both left to right and Ruth to left. So, I

1. iterate through each row and read the number string from left to right
2. Store each number along with its cell range. ie: 467 is 0-2.
3. Then from each symbol, find out if the position of the symbol +/-1 falls into any range. If so then sum that number.

I haven't been parsing the input string character by character and instead have been parsing into native data structures. It makes the code more verbose but it's how I want to do it. Unfortunately it does mean most of the time coming up with a solution is structuring the data so I'm hoping I come up with a faster way after a few days.

I went with a matrix approach and was just planning to handle it through indexes but kinda gave up halfway implementing the finding of numbers, their start/end positions... I'm guessing a regex but that might have issues if we have identical numbers later, so not sure. Will surely go back to it eventually though :P

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