Programming

The Day 03 challenge involves the calculating whether a character symbol is adjacent to a part number in a two dimensional map, such as:

467..114..
...*......
..35..633.
......#...
617*......
.....+.58.
..592.....
......755.
...$.*....
.664.598..

and then doing things with the part numbers.

To calculate whether a symbol is adjacent to a part number we’re going to need:

• the position of each symbol,
• the position of each number,
• the length of the token for each number.

Tokenising the input

The simplest way to get this data that I can think of is to parse the map into a list of tokens, where the number and blank tokens contain the info for me to know the length (ie. the &str).

After refreshing my knowledge of the rust parsing library ’nom’ with the day01 challenge, I was keen to do the second challenge without, simply using the standard library’s string manipulation and default parsing for this simpler parsing problem.

At the same time, I was keen to work more with GitHub Copilot since I’ve not been able to use copilot at my most recent job due to potential legal issues.

The Elf’s game for day 02 consists of pulling out multiple combinations of red, green and blue balls from a sack - and the parsing looks quite straight forward.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve taken time to enjoy coding challenges primarily for the fun of it. Over the next months, I’m keen to work my way through the 2023 Advent of Code - a fun set of problems created by Eric Wastl strung together with a seasonal story - and write up a bit about my own learning and fun.

For me it’s a chance to keep improving my fluency with various Rust libraries and tools (start learning the Rust programming language here!). And the first day of the 2023 Advent of Code is a parsing exercise - a good opportunity to re-familiarise myself with Rust’s nom parsing library as well as re-enforce in my head that confirmation bias is strong in this one (me).

Advent of code 2023 - I’ll eventually collect some general info about the libraries that I’m using repeatedly, as well as some other more general learning, but the details are in each post below.