[Exercise Approaches]: Audit/Cleanup of Track Approaches 2026 (part 2)

[Yrahcaz7]

This is a tracking issue for existing approaches on the Python track.
(Part 1 of the audit/cleanup was issue #4055.)

In general, we are auditing/reviewing the following:

• Spelling, grammar, and typos
• Python syntax
• Clarity of writing and explanation
• Readability and maintainability
• White space
• Other Exercism markdown specifications as needed
• Possible missing/additional approaches (noted as TODOs of future work)

See the lists for each category below. Exercises in "Merged Audits" have been reviewed, changed, and merged. Exercises in "Unaudited" have approaches that have not been audited yet.

Exercises in "Approaches In Progress" do not have finished/published approaches yet, while those in "Missing Approaches" do not have any known work on their approaches yet.

If you want to work on an exercise that is missing an approach, please check in with the maintainers to avoid conflicting with current track priorities or others who may be working on things.

Merged Audits

• Acronym: [Acronym] Approach docs cleanup #4258
• Atbash Cipher: [RNA Transcription & Atbash Cipher]: Approaches Cleanup #4191
• Collatz Conjecture: [Collatz Conjecture Dig Deeper]: Corrections & Edit #4250
• Darts: [Darts Approach Docs] Various fixes and improvements #4187
• Leap: [Leap Approaches]: Typos & Fixes per issue 4197 #4252
• Reverse String: [Reverse String] Clean up approach docs #4226
• RNA Transcription: [rna-transcription approach]: a few improvements #4052 and [RNA Transcription & Atbash Cipher]: Approaches Cleanup #4191
• Robot Name: robot-name approach: fix typos, minor rephasing/improvements #4051
• Rotational Cipher: [Rotational Cipher Approaches] Fix ALPHABET capitalization and approaches link #4184
• Sublist: [Sublist] Fix existing approaches & add new ones #4190
• Wordy: [Wordy] Clean up Approaches #4198

Unaudited

• All Your Base
• Bob: PR forthcoming
• Circular Buffer
• DnD Character
• Flower Field (formerly Minesweeper)
• Grains
• Hamming
• Isogram
• Luhn
• Matching Brackets
• Nth Prime
• Palindrome Products
• Pangram
• Pig Latin
• Raindrops
• Roman Numerals
• Scrabble Score
• Sieve
• Yacht

Approaches In Progress

• Allergies
• Anagram
• Armstrong Numbers
• Book Store
• ETL: [ETL] Approaches First Draft #3378
• Gigasecond: Create intoduction for dig deeper in gigasecond exercise #3772
• ISBN Verifier
• Markdown
• Matrix
• Perfect Numbers
• Protein Translation
• Robot Simulator
• Saddle Points
• Say
• Space Age
• Sum Of Multiples: [Sum of Multiples] Add Approaches #3375
• Transpose
• Triangle
• Word Count: [Word Count] Approaches First Draft #3371

Missing Approaches

• Affine Cipher
• Alphametics
• Bank Account
• Binary Search
• Binary Search Tree
• Bottle Song
• Bowling
• Change
• Clock
• Complex Numbers
• Connect
• Crypto Square
• Diamond
• Difference Of Squares
• Diffie Hellman
• Dominoes
• Dot DSL
• Flatten Array
• Food Chain
• Forth
• Go Counting
• Grade School
• Grep
• Hangman (to be replaced by Save the Cow)
• High Scores
• House
• Kindergarten Garden
• Knapsack
• Largest Series Product
• Ledger
• Linked List
• List Ops
• Meetup
• OCR Numbers
• PaaS I/O
• Phone Number
• Poker
• POV
• Prime Factors
• Proverb
• Pythagorean Triplet
• Queen Attack
• Rail Fence Cipher
• Rational Numbers
• React
• Rectangles
• Resistor Color
• Resistor Color Duo
• Resistor Color Trio
• Rest API
• Run Length Encoding
• Satellite
• Scale Generator
• Secret Handshake
• Series
• SGF Parsing
• Simple Cipher
• Simple Linked List
• Spiral Matrix
• Tournament
• Tree Building
• Twelve Days
• Two Bucket
• Two Fer
• Variable Length Quantity
• Word Search
• Zebra Puzzle
• Zipper

[github-actions]

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[BethanyG]

That markdown table is ... terrifying. We might need to try something else. I will think on it. 😄

[Yrahcaz7]

Just went and updated the entries for the approaches that I audited... Yeah, that table's terrifying.

Edit: Just went and normalized the formatting on the table as well. ADHD beats terror every time 😆.

[Yrahcaz7]

Addressed in PR #4258:

Acronym Dig Deeper audit

• Overall:

  • The usage of "scrub the input" is a bit odd; I would have expected "clean the input" to be used. Here, "scrub" means "remove", but the cleaning for some approaches is not just removing characters.
  • There is inconsistency between single quotes and double quotes, when it should be consistent within the same exercise.
  • There are hyphens that should be em-dashes.
  • Some comments are right up against the #, which can hurt readability.

• introduction.md:

  • Line 15 has a stray backtick at the end.
  • Lines 25, 26 and 31: The markdown links are not rendered because the link definitions are missing from the bottom of the file.
  • Line 54: "Generator" should not be capitalized here.
  • The generator expression approach has an unnecessary extra set of parentheses. (Lines 64 to 70.)
  • Line 134 and 141: Are all of the approaches really idiomatic? The re.sub() approach is called a "fun experiment" in its approach doc, it is many times slower than the others, and it can be hard to understand.
  • Line 149 is confusing with its two instances of "least performant". It should be rewritten to clarify that re.sub is the slowest by far.

• loop/content.md, list-comprehension/content.md, generator-expression/content.md, functools-reduce/content.md, and map-function/content.md:

  • The first list item is incorrect:
    • Nothing is done with spaces or single quotes in the input at all.
    • Saying "scrub" or "remove" is kind of misleading, as the characters are replaced with spaces, not empty strings.
  • The paragraph after the list is confusing, as the returned string (versus returned list) is what the chained method is called on. It's especially misleading because <str>.replace() has actual string arguments, and it might make it sound like somehow those turn into lists.
  • The last line of the exercism/note: Is "As of this writing" a valid way to say "when this was written"? The phrase reads kind of strangely.

• map-function/content.md:

  • Line 31: There is a stray parenthesis: 'GNU'[0], 'IMAGE'[0], 'MANIPULATION'[0]), 'PROGRAM'[0]
  • Line 37: "acronym rather" should be "acronym, rather".

• functools-reduce/content.md:

  • Line 40: The empty string should be surrounded by backticks for readability and clarity.
  • Line 40: "ahead/before" is rather confusing. Shouldn't it just be "before"?

• regex-join/content.md and regex-sub/content.md:

  • The first line of prose rather confusing.

• regex-join/content.md:

  • Line 56: "omit matching on" is confusing, it should probably be "stop matching on".
  • Lines 56 and 59: The space surrounded by backticks does not render properly.
  • Line 82: "generator expression + join + upper" should be changed to be more readable.

• regex-sub/content.md:

  • Line 11 and 16: return and re have an extra space between them.
  • Line 31 says "the phrase" where everywhere else it is referred to as to_abbreviate.
  • Line 50 is missing numbers in the "this will match ..." From the docs:

    For Unicode (str) patterns:

    Matches Unicode word characters; this includes all Unicode alphanumeric characters (as defined by str.isalnum()), as well as the underscore (_).

    Matches [a-zA-Z0-9_] if the ASCII flag is used.

    For 8-bit (bytes) patterns:

    Matches characters considered alphanumeric in the ASCII character set; this is equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9_]. If the LOCALE flag is used, matches characters considered alphanumeric in the current locale and the underscore.

  • Line 59: The space surrounded by backticks does not render properly.
  • Line 59: Both - should be _.
  • Line 59: The empty string should be surrounded by backticks for readability and clarity.

• The performance article:

  • Line 5 says "seven idiomatic approaches" but then the list lays out eight different approaches.
  • Line 17 says a ninth will be added, but its description of it is basically the same as number 7 in the list.
  • Line 22: numpy is called numbpy.
  • Line 25 is strange, adding a word like "however" at the beginning or the end would fix that.
  • Line 27: "10x or more times" should be "10 (or more) times".
  • Line 29: "easiest read" should be "easiest to read".
  • The re.findall() approach always has "first letters" by it, but it is not clear that this means a different re.findall() approach than what is in the approach doc.

@BethanyG, I have a question: My solution seems to use an approach that doesn't have an approach doc. Is it worth adding a new approach doc for this? I'd probably need some guidance on how to update and use the benchmark application.

[BethanyG]

@BethanyG, I have a question: My solution seems to use an approach that doesn't have an approach doc. Is it worth adding a new approach doc for this? I'd probably need some guidance on how to update and use the benchmark application.

Sure! why not?. I say go for it, and I am happy to help you use/update the benchmarking! 😄