Advent of Code 2025 Day 6 (BaseA Style)

[AlteryxCommunityTeam]

Discussion thread for day 6 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/6

[Goddenra]

Slice and dice, enjoyed it!

Spoiler

Almost came a cropper with Part 2, before realising my approach of assuming each row had a number to add to the equation wasn't right.

[clmc9601]

@Pilsner if you’re using a workflow generated via template (like this starter kit), just change the number of characters in the template! Then you never have to think about it. Pretty sure the starter kit’s template input is already expanded, because I got tired of forgetting this same step haha. 

[JeffF]

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[DataNath]

Day 6 ticked off! My part 2 can definitely be more elegant but by the end I was struggling to even keep up with all of the position IDs I'd created!

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[mmontgomery]

Day 6

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P1 as pretty easy, per usual
P2 took me a long time to figure out approach as I wasnt sure where the delimiter should go. After about an hour, I realized the final row's operation indicated the first column of a new set of values - thus where to put the appropriate placeholder 0 to ensure the columns would line up

[Erin]

I got hung up on another rookie mistake with how I input my data which just made everything go coocoo bananas (technical term). 

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[Erin]

@clmc9601  Your AoC Starter Kit is exactly what I needed roughly 6 days ago. Yes I know you tagged it multiple times in multiple places, but apparently I only learn the hard way. Very much a me problem. Thanks for sharing! Again!

[DanFlint]

I think I massively overcomplicated this - but at least it works

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Part 1 solution should work for any number of rows
Part 2 got away from me and I'm looking forward to seeing how everyone else did it simpler!
I think I could have replaced the macros with dynamic replaces, good reminder to relearn the dynamic replace tool...

[Stosh]

Today was a classic case of breezing through Part 1 and wheezing through Part 2😂 I ended up taking a peek at the community solutions to help me along in Part 2, so unfortunately my streak of needing 0 assistance is over for now. That being said, proud to officially be halfway through the challenge!

My Solution:

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My Reflection:

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Part 1 was super light. Since the spaces were irrelevant, it was a matter of simply parsing the numbers or operators, lining up the numbers in the right order, and applying the appropriate operator. I actually got this correct on my first attempt, so I was feeling great heading into Part 2, where my confidence was immediately shot down.

My first two attempts of Part 2 ignored the leading/trailing space problem completely 😂 My first attempt was to line them all up left aligned, such that the numbers 1, 23, and 456, would become 124, 35, and 6. Once I found out that was wrong, instead of heading back and really trying to understand what was happening, I went "Ohhh I see, it must be RIGHT aligned!" After reconfiguring the flow such that those same numbers would become 4, 25, and 136 and getting it wrong again, I finally went back to fully read the problem and realized just how screwed I was 😂 After messing with different RegEx patterns for what felt like forever, I decided to just start looking around at what others had done, and noticed that most people were actually parsing out their strings by character so you can track exactly where a character would line up vertically with one in another string. Genius! Once I made this discovery, the rest was super easy, as it was just a matter of concatenating by position and applying the same process done in Part 1.

Overall, I am slightly disappointed to have not come up with that brilliant idea in Part 2 on my own, I came into this knowing parts of some challenges might be at a level of difficulty that is higher than my current skillset, so I am okay to chalk it up as a learning experience.

[DaisukeTsuchiya]

Spoiler

I was able to solve P1 by splitting the input into rows. For P2, it was necessary to split into rows, considering the positions of the spaces.