AoC Utils: Helper functions for Advent of Code

These are some helper functions which I have collected (and changed and, hopefully, improved) over the years of solving Advent of Code in Clojure.

I usually kept them inside of each AoC repo, but now I have decided to make a package out of it because of two reasons:

• now I don't have to copy-paste it every year, and due to some modifications end up with several slightly different versions of the same thing
• maybe there's somebody else who finds this useful and uses it for their AoC solving.

Installing

Add the following to your deps.edn file:

{:deps
  ; other deps
  ,,,
  ; check the latest tag and sha in the releases/tags: 
  ; https://github.com/narimiran/aoc-utils/tags
  com.github.narimiran/aoc-utils {:git/tag "v0.9.0" :git/sha "c1d07b4"}
}

Usage

(ns day01
  (:require [aoc-utils.core :as aoc]))

(->> (aoc/parse-lines (aoc/read-input 1) row-parsing-function)
     (aoc/sum-by row-function)

Or take a look how I used this library in my AoC solutions:

• AoC 2019
• AoC 2023
• AoC 2024

Documentation

The documentation is available at: https://narimiran.github.io/aoc-utils

FAQ

Why is there no function to automatically retrieve input file for a given task?

Because I'm oldschool and I never used such functions/tools. I like to visually inspect the input file before I manually copy it.

If I get the information that this repo has more users than just myself (and they would like to have it), I'll consider adding it.

 

Why does the read-input function use (this) hard-coded location of inputs?

Because my AoC repos usually contain solutions in multiple languages and I keep inputs external to all of them, like this:

.
├── clojure
│   ├── deps.edn
│   └── src
│       ├── day01.clj
│       └── day02.clj
├── inputs
│   ├── 01.txt
│   └── 02.txt
├── python
│   ├── day01.py
│   └── day02.py
├── LICENSE.txt
└── README.md

If your repo has a different structure, it is probably the best to not use the read-input function and to use slurp directly. Or write your own version of the function.