Day 18 is reimplementing a simple math system with addition, multiplication, and parentheses, where the order of operations changes. I’ll write a single calc function that takes in the string to evaluate as well as the order of operations to apply.

Challenge

The puzzle can be found here. I’m given a series of one line math problems containing numbers and +*(). In both parts, I need to process anything inside () first. In part one, it’s just left to right after that. In part two, I have to evaluate all the + first, and then do the *.

Solution

Part 1

This is another case where recursion works well to get rid of the (). My calc function has two modes. If there’s a ( present in the input, it will walk the string, starting from the first ( counting open parentheses. Once that count reaches zero, that sub-string is re-submitted to the calc function, and replaced into the string, which is then passed back into calc.

When there are no parentheses, it splits the string into grams, taking the first one as the total, and then evaluating the total with the next operator and number to make a new total.

def calc(s):
    if "(" in s:
        openp = 0
        start = s.index("(")
        for i in range(start, len(s)):
            if s[i] == "(":
                openp += 1
            elif s[i] == ")":
                openp -= 1
            if openp == 0:
                break
        return calc(s[:start] + str(calc(s[start + 1 : i])) + s[i + 1 :])

    else:
        grams = s.split(" ")
        total = int(grams[0])
        for i in range(1, len(grams), 2):
            total = eval(f"{total} {grams[i]} {grams[i+1]}")
        return total

Now I just need to loop over all the lines and total each of their results:

with open(sys.argv[1], "r") as f:
    probs = f.readlines()

part1 = sum([calc(l) for l in probs])
print(f"Part 1: {part1}")

Part 2

I was tempted to create a calc2 function, copying the first and modifying it, but I wanted to make one calc that worked on any order of operations sent.

I added a second argument, order, which is an array of strings representing operators that should be processed together. For example, actual math might look like ['*/', '+-'] to process multiplication and division first, then addition and subtraction. Part one is just this calc with order ['+*']. But for part two that will change to ['+', '*'].

I’ll work through one time for each ops in order. So part one will just take one pass since both are processed at the same time, where part two will take two. I’ll check each operator, and if it’s in the current ops, then evaluate it. When I take three items out of the list and replace it with one, it actually works out that the next operator is now in the same position as the previous one, so I don’t need to change i. When the operator isn’t in ops, I’ll jump i to the next one.

def calc(s, order):
    if "(" in s:
        openp = 0
        start = s.index("(")
        for i in range(start, len(s)):
            if s[i] == "(":
                openp += 1
            elif s[i] == ")":
                openp -= 1
            if openp == 0:
                break
        return calc(s[:start] + calc(s[start + 1 : i], order) + s[i + 1 :], order)

    else:
        grams = s.split(" ")
        total = 0
        for ops in order:
            i = 1
            while i < len(grams):
                if grams[i] in ops:
                    grams = (
                        grams[: i - 1]
                        + [str(eval(" ".join(grams[i - 1 : i + 2])))]
                        + grams[i + 2 :]
                    )

                else:
                    i += 2
        assert len(grams) == 1
        return grams[0]

Final Code

Don’t have speed issues on this challenge:

$ time python3 day18.py 18-puzzle.txt
Part 1: 29839238838303
Part 2: 201376568795521

real    0m0.129s
user    0m0.124s
sys     0m0.004s

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys


def calc(s, order):
    if "(" in s:
        openp = 0
        start = s.index("(")
        for i in range(start, len(s)):
            if s[i] == "(":
                openp += 1
            elif s[i] == ")":
                openp -= 1
            if openp == 0:
                break
        return calc(s[:start] + calc(s[start + 1 : i], order) + s[i + 1 :], order)

    else:
        grams = s.split(" ")
        total = 0
        for ops in order:
            i = 1
            while i < len(grams):
                if grams[i] in ops:
                    grams = (
                        grams[: i - 1]
                        + [str(eval(" ".join(grams[i - 1 : i + 2])))]
                        + grams[i + 2 :]
                    )

                else:
                    i += 2
        assert len(grams) == 2
        return grams[0]


with open(sys.argv[1], "r") as f:
    probs = f.readlines()

part1 = sum([int(calc(l, ["+*"])) for l in probs])
print(f"Part 1: {part1}")

part2 = sum([int(calc(l, ["+", "*"])) for l in probs])
print(f"Part 2: {part2}")