I was surprised seeing ton of people going for the replace approach. It didn't even cross my mind to edit the string, I went straight for regex for part 1 and it was easy enough to adapt it for part 2.
On the surface level it makes sense since you already wrote the code to extract the numbers based on digits, which will be in the back of your mind. Once you have some time think about though, it's obvious it's better to just directly find the first and last "digit" without changing the string.
I did this exact thing and hit the point where it didn't work. I appreciated that the problem broke my code because it made me arrive at a better solution.
My solution was worse than most: replace one -> one1one You are only going to do the replace all for each number and if the "e" is also in eight it is still there for the next set of replace.
A better quick and dirty solution from Mastodon was to just add the common character first: twone -> twoone
I just check every substring haha
The problem is that 21 is not the only problematic combination.
You can also use o1e as there are never more than a single shared character. It also doesn't change the string size so it can be done in place. Still an ugly hack of a solution.
I have hacked together the ugliest of solutions and got my two stars but at what price?
I just reverse the string and reverse the number names >_>
Cheater?
Maybe...
That's clever. Way more than my Regex abomination
everything
Just saw this community and it looks cool even though I'm probably not capable of solving most of the puzzles. But having looked through the community, I can only really find solution threads. Where are the actual puzzles posted so I can give it a go?
https://adventofcode.com/2023 The first question is public, login to get your test data and submit your answers and unlock part 2.
