General Discussions
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Wow, that was wild. So much slicing and dicing that I feel like a surgeon... but unexpectedly on numbers. Thankful it took less than an hour!
Lots of parsing!
My part 2 gotchas:
- Read the problem carefully: the leading/trailing spaces are important, and they vary by line
- Remember to remove the space columns before concatenating the numbers
- If you end up with zeroes (for example not all columns have a number with four digits), don't multiply by 0 on that row
Another simple problem??? The trickiest part of today was the testing of my reading comprehension.
Otherwise, simple prepping, parsing, and blending of data to get the output!
Version 2 (More Elegant/Clearer Design):
Happy Solving!
Day 6 complete, halfway through already?! This problem served as yet another reminder to check the field length on the input tool (one day I'll remember to check first) 😂
Part 1
1) Step one involved parsing the values into their respective columns. Using the regex tokenise, this was easy enough as I could define each group of values as a list of “non-spaces”.
2) Next, I decided to separate the operators from the numeric values. This allowed me to then join back based on the previously created column ID, so that I knew exactly which operation should apply to each number.
3) With the separate operations identified, I filtered to the multiplications and used the summarise tool to find the product of the numbers, per column.
4) All the remaining values (answers to the multiplications and the values that were originally addition) can now be unioned together. By summing the column containing the unioned answers, the grand total can be calculated.
Part 2
My part one and part two are actually begin quite differently to each other. Other than sharing a row ID, the two data streams split almost immediately.
1) As we now know the cephalopods read numbers vertically, I decided to tokenise each row, at the single character level (spaces included), before assigning a vertical ID.
2) By filtering out the operators, I could then focus on just the numbers. As all vertically aligned values now share an ID, it was a simple case of concatenating the values to find the cephalopods' numbers.
3) Similarly to part one, I then joined the numbers back to the operations, based on the vertical ID. Unfortunately, because the ID was no longer based on the entire “original column”, there were some missing operators. The operators always appear in the first Vertical ID of the column, so a simple multi-row can populate the remaining values.
4) Now, in order to assign the original column ID I used another multi-row formula, which counted up one, whenever it came across a space.
5) The final steps are the same as above, as the multiplications were calculated first, before all the remaining numbers were then summed together to arrive at a grand total.
