Let’s see how many stars we’ll collect.

Welcome to Day 3!

• Day 1 for introduction and solutions to the first day’s puzzles.
• Day 2 for solutions to the second day’s puzzles.

Advent of Code is a competition but I’d like to emphasize that my main motivation is not to compete or get a place in the leaderboard.

The puzzles are great for learning data structures in Python and how to create better algorithms. They’re also very good mind exercises. Last but not least, it’s so much fun to complete puzzles and collect stars.

We’ll learn about the following topics in this puzzle:

• List comprehension in Python
• Using regex expressions to find patterns in a string
• Basic Pandas DataFrame operations
• String manipulation in Pandas

As of writing this article, the first 11 puzzles have been released and each puzzle has two parts. Each part counts for a start and here is my current progress: