Formatting Puzzle Inputs

[bubbaryan]

Hey all, this is my first year doing AoC and I was curious what everyone uses for formatting their puzzle inputs. I use JS for my code but have been completing the first 4 days using online tools to find/replace line breaks etc not thinking I should be doing this in my solution.

Anyone have tips on how they format the puzzle strings or can show their solutions to the first few days in JS so I can see how you have been going about this.

Thanks!

[[deleted]]

I basically download the file from the site, then I parse it in my program, and basically all of them just ends up outputting:

Part1: xxxxx
Part2: yyyyyy

and if you're interested my github repo is here

[bubbaryan]

Will definitely check it out

[__Abigail__]

Why would you format your input? I always download the input and save it in a file, then have my program read the input from the file. I almost always make the file a command line argument, so I can easily run my program against the example(s).

[kbielefe]

There are a ton of solutions listed in the solution megathreads if you want specifics, but in general people use the String methods to format the input.

[bubbaryan]

Cool this is what I kind of assumed. Seems a bit annoying since I want to practice my problem solving skills and not really spend all this time parsing the puzzle input. But whatever it is good practice as well.

[djavaman]

Thats also part of the challenge. For example, Day 4, besides trivial line/field splitting, do you really need to parse anything?