Advent of Code

http://adventofcode.com/

I like solving these in multiple languages. For the first few years it was Elixir. Now it's Ruby, Python, Elixir, Common Lisp, or whatever other language I choose.

The aoc Script

The bash script aoc in this directory will run any solution or test for any year, and can initialize a day by copying a template and downloading the initial data file if there is one (See Initializing a Day below). Run aoc --help to see all of the options.

The makeup command used by the -m flag is a script of mine that finds the nearest Makefile, Rakefile, or similar build file and runs the corresponding make tool. The -m flag runs makeup before running the solution.

The Data

Per the preference of the author of Advent of Code (Reddit comment), I should not be making all of my data inputs available in this repo. So I've removed them and will instead store them elsewhere and create a link to that data directory into this directory, which is now ignored by git (see .gitignore).

If you want to use much of this code, you'll need to know my naming convention and the data format for the test input files.

The files for each day are stored in data/yYYYY/dayDD_P.txt where YYYY is the year, DD is the two-digit day number, and P is the part number 1 or 2. Test files are stored in data/yYYYY/dayDD_P_test.txt.

The Ruby helper code is written such that if a part 2 data or test file does not exist, it looks for a part 1 version because very often the data is shared between the two parts; only the expected answers differ.

Test File Format

Each test file contains one or more sets of test data and expected answers (collectively called "chunks") for both part 1 and part 2. The expected answers come first, followed by the lines of input test data.

# expected-answer-part-1,expected-answer-part-2
test 1 test data
test 1 more test data

# t2-expected-answer-part-1,t2-expected-answer-part-2
test 2 test data
test 2 more test data

Initializing a Day

If the environment variable AOC_COOKIE is set, then the first data file will also be fetched if one is given. You can get the cookie from inspecting any request to adventofcode.com in your browser while you are logged in. It will look like session=some-hex-string.

export AOC_COOKIE="session=..."

Running the Solutions

Any language's solution can be run using the aoc script.

The Ruby solutions are set up so that you can run the solution file and pass it a subset of the same args (--year or -y, --day or -d, and --testing or -t).