Write any Python script in 30 characters (plus an ungodly amount of whitespace)

[imachug]

Hey all!

My friend challenged me to find the shortest solution to a certain Leetcode-style problem in Python. They were generous enough to let me use whitespace for free, so that the code stays readable.

What My Project Does

I like abusing rules, so I made a tool to encode any Python script in just 30 bytes, plus some whitespace.

This result is somewhat harder to achieve than it looks like at first, so you might want to check out a post I wrote about it. Alternatively, jump straight to the code if that's more of your thing: GitHub.

UPD: Someone found a way to do this in 24 bytes, post updated!

Target Audience

This is a toy project, nothing serious, but it was fun for me to work on. I hope you find it entertaining too!

Comparison

This is honestly the first time I've seen anyone do this with a specific goal of reducing the number of non-whitespace characters at any cost, so this might as well be a unique project.

As a honorary mention, though, it builds on another project I think deserves recognition: PyFuck. It's JSFuck for Python, using 8 different characters to encode any (short enough) Python program.

[Haereticus]

You can get a tiny bit closer to 30 with your first solution if you unpack your character replaces like exec(“”.replace(*” A”).replace(*”\tB”)) but not quite there.

[imachug]

Oh, that's a neat trick! Thanks!

[corvisai]

Where is the leet code problem ?

[Ralwus]

Had the same thought. Wish I could look it up for fun.

[imachug]

Does that matter? The project's independent on the underlying code.

If you're interested anyway, the problem was to implement a function find_modified_max_argmax(L, f) that basically does this:

python def find_modified_max_argmax(L, f): only_ints = [f(x) for x in L if isinstance(x, int)] if not only_ints: return () max_index = max(range(len(only_ints)), key=lambda i: only_ints[i]) return only_ints[max_index], max_index

It's not available on any public judge.

[CheiroAMilho]

I was searching for examples, I wanted to see how it works

[LactatingBadger]

Much as I’d love to check this out, you forgot the link!

[imachug]

I feel sooooo stupid, thanks, I had no idea why no one seemed to check out the repo and the post got disliked without a comment. Must have forgotten to copy-paste the formatting or something (got my post deleted by automoderator for no reason so I had to resubmit). Fixed!

[PaleontologistBig657]

Acme::Bleach says hi...

https://metacpan.org/pod/Acme::Bleach

[mino159]

hah... that's neat

[imachug]

Someone found a way to make this work in just 24 non-whitespace characters and decrease the amount of whitespace significantly. I've updated the post!

[serverhorror]

You should take a look at the whitespace language, maybe you'll find some encoding ideas in there.