I’m wondering - some people are posting solutions ...

# advent-of-code

[Michael Böiers]

I’m wondering - some people are posting solutions without input parsing. IMHO that should be part of the solution. What do you think?

[Michael Böiers]

I can see both sides of the argument - the input parsing is a bit boring, but on the other hand in some of the challenges it can take up a decent amount of the total code. For the current challenge, it seems quite natural to base the solution on something like List<Int>. Difficult to say!

[mertceyhan]

readInput(name: String) returns List<String> , you can map this list to List<Int>

[Paul Woitaschek]

Im transforming on a sequence<string>

[Paul Woitaschek]

I expect everything to come in the form of lines. But it's also my first AOC, so let's see

[Even André Fiskvik]

Using a template is handy 😄 https://github.com/kotlin-hands-on/advent-of-code-kotlin-template

[Michael de Kaste]

The only piece of code I've hidden away in an abstract class I'm extending, is reading the contents of an entire file into a string. The actual string -> input part, I write out and show in solutions.

Preprocessing the input before you go through using it, is a big part of solving the problems at hand. And it can be way more complicated than just making a list of ints too. Preprocessing is done outside my two functions as well.

For example, I was doing AoC2018-day17 the other night where you basically had input instructions that specified lines on a grid. By preprocessing this data, I don't store the input as those line instructions, but rather as a map<Point, Tile>.

This preprocessing can sometimes be quite a bit of code, depending on the complexity of the input, so I feel hiding it wouldn't be fair. But thats how I process input, and everyone uses their own approach.

[Michael Böiers]

I‘ve always felt that the “cleanest” approach is to solve each challenge as a program (fun main) that reads the input as a string from stdin and then prints two strings (or numbers) to stdout.