aococr 1.0.0

Advent of Code ASCII-art character recognition

aococr

OCR tool in python for Advent of Code (AoC) ASCII art.

Som AoC puzzles produce a result which uses values '#', and '.' to mimic pixels turned on/off in a display, like below:

.##..###...##.
#..#.#..#.#..#
#..#.###..#...
####.#..#.#...
#..#.#..#.#..#
#..#.###...##.

Converting the above string into the string 'ABC' is a task which, unaccaptably, requires a human to think and type for a few seconds.

This package exposes functionality to automatically parse ASCII art-like displays like the above into strings. It can be called in two ways in python, via the aococr method, or via the aoc-ocr command-line tool.

Variations like fontsize of the ASCII glyphs and handling other characters than "#" / "." Should™ be handled automatically. If not, see the aococr docstring.

Installation

pip install aococr

Usage

Can be used in a python script, or from the command line

In python:

from aococr import aococr

display_string = """
.##..###...##.
#..#.#..#.#..#
#..#.###..#...
####.#..#.#...
#..#.#..#.#..#
#..#.###...##.
"""

s = aococr(display_string)
print(s)  # prints "ABC"

The aococr method accepts several data types:

• list of lists of characters
• strings, which are stripped of trailing/leading whitespace and converted into lists of lists
• numpy-arrays of characters (though numpy is not a dependency)

A helper method for displaying ASCII art on a terminal can also be imported using from aococr import display. It takes any of the formats listed above, replaces '.' with ' ' to increase readability, and prints it.

From command line

The aoc-ocr CLI tool reads from stdin and writes its result to stdout, so it can be run on e.g. ascii art in a text file, or by piping the output from another script directly like:

aoc-ocr < some_file.txt
# or
python solve_day_xx.py | aoc-ocr

Credit

The ASCII-glyphs come from mstksg's advent-of-code-ocr Haskell library, which lists contributions to collecting the fonts to Reddit users u/usbpc102, u/TheShallowOne, and @gilgamec.