Minesweeper is a popular game where the user has to find the mines using numeric hints that indicate how many mines are directly adjacent (horizontally, vertically, diagonally) to a square.
Your task is to add the mine counts to empty squares in a completed Minesweeper board.
The board itself is a rectangle composed of squares that are either empty (' '
) or a mine ('*'
).
For each empty square, count the number of mines adjacent to it (horizontally, vertically, diagonally). If the empty square has no adjacent mines, leave it empty. Otherwise replace it with the adjacent mines count.
For example, you may receive a 5 x 4 board like this (empty spaces are represented here with the '路' character for display on screen):
路*路*路
路路*路路
路路*路路
路路路路路
Which your code should transform into this:
1*3*1
13*31
路2*2路
路111路
All the inputs and outputs are in ASCII.
Rust String
s and &str
are utf8, so while one might expect "Hello".chars()
to be simple, it actually has to check each char to see if it's 1, 2, 3 or 4 u8
s long.
If we know a &str
is ASCII then we can call .as_bytes()
and refer to the underlying data as a &[u8]
(byte slice).
Iterating over a slice of ASCII bytes is much quicker as there are no codepoints involved - every ASCII byte is one u8
long.
Can you complete the challenge without cloning the input?
Sign up to Exercism to learn and master Rust with 98 exercises, and real human mentoring, all for free.
We explore nested for loops, clever use of min/max to simplify bounds checking, functional pipelines and using two-dimensional matrices.