advent-of-code-2018

https://adventofcode.com

This is my attempt at some of the code advent problems. I will try and do them all, but inevitably, I will get bored/stuck at some point and give up.

I'm also going to try and do this in Python to learn something, as I think with R it will either be too easy or too frustrating.

I also want to try and write unit tests for everything, just to try and encourage myself to follow best practices.

What did I learn?

Day 1

• Using itertools to cycle through the lists is far quicker than any loop
• Using a dictionary (i.e. curly brackets {}).

Day 2

• Using enumerate to get an itemised list.
• Loading in a text file into a list
• Using Counter from collections to count the number of letters in a string.

Day 3

• Regular Expressions (though I didn't really learn this - rather just copied all of this from Reddit)
• Using defaultdict to have a dictionary with a key and then multiple values.

Day 4

• This is a really hard advent calendar! I think I prefer chocolate.
• Continued to use defaultdict from the previous day.
• Using the .split() function instead of regular expressions when all lines have a similar structure.
• argmax() to return the index/location of the maximum rather than a value.

### Day 5

• The solution on Reddit was so simple and clean for this, I just copied it and explained what was going on.
• Again we use list comprehension, but also the .pop() and .append() things are used. I'd particularly never seen .pop() before, but it could be useful.
• ascii_lowercase is imported from the string library as a reference string used in the second part.