LONG READ: My 2023 Advent Of Code Solutions

Advent of code is a fun way to practice your problem solving skills, get some coding practice, or even picking up a new language. I am planning on solving this years problems in Go, so I can learn more about the language

Day 1

Part 1

The first part of day 1 of AoC basically consists on the following. Given a file input like this one:

1abc2
pqr3stu8vwx
a1b2c3d4e5f
treb7uchet

Find the first and last number of each line, in this case 12, 38, 15, and 77. Add them together to get the answer of the first part of the challenge, in this case 142.

This was my solution written in Go

package main
 
import (
	"fmt"
	"log"
	"os"
	"strconv"
	"strings"
)
 
func main() {
	content, err := os.ReadFile("in.txt")
	
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	
	str_content := string(content)
	split_string := strings.Split(str_content, "\n")
	
	sum := 0
	for _, s := range split_string {
		nums := []int{}
		for _, char := range s {
			num, err := strconv.Atoi(string(char))
				if err == nil {
					nums = append(nums, num)
				}
		}
		
		nums_len := len(nums)
		sum += nums[0] * 10
		sum += nums[nums_len-1]
	}
	
	f, _ := os.Create("out.txt")
	f.WriteString(fmt.Sprint(sum))
	f.Close()
}

This code takes in a file in.txt, finds all the numbers in each line, and finally adds the first and last one as a single number to a global sum. It then writes this sum to an out.txt file, which I can copy paste into AoC

Yay! First part done.

Part 2

Now for part two. We need to also parse the numbers that are written as text, one is 1, two is 2, and so on. My first thought was to do a simple search and r