[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: [Roman Numerals] Approach docs fixes #4289 and a forthcoming PR
• 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! 😄

[Yrahcaz7]

Addressed in PR #4226:

Reverse String Dig Deeper audit (part 1 of 2)

• Overall:

  • There appears to be mixed quote types; I think these are supposed to be consistent per exercise.

• introduction.md:

  • Line 17: "Range()" should be "range()".
  • Line 26: "non ASCII" should be "non-ASCII".
  • Line 39 is missing a period at the end.
  • Line 55: "But" should probably be "However,"
  • Line 67: #For should probably be replaced with # <-- For.
  • Many terms are missing backticks around them. (Lines 17-20, 55, 60, 72, 80, etc.)

• sequence-slicing/content.md:

  • Line 24 seems to use ** for bold, but the website renders it as italics instead?
  • It saying "the space before" is very confusing, as there are actual spaces that were put in the syntax definition (probably for readability). It should either refer to the placeholders in a different way or the spaces in the syntax thing should be removed.
  • Line 26: Both "-->"s should be replaced with "to"s.
  • The paragraph on lines 24 to 30 is very long, and it jumps around to multiple different sub-topics, so it should be split up.
  • Line 33: The hyphen should be an em-dash.
  • Line 37: O(n + n) is not valid Big-O notation, it should be changed to O(n) or just removed entirely.

• iteration-and-concatenation/content.md:

  • Lines 16, 17, and 19: 'output' should probably be output.
  • Line 17 vs 18: One has O(m + n) and the other has O(n + m), it should be consistent.
  • Line 22: There should be an "it" between "that" and "is".
  • Line 22: "O(n**2)" should be surrounded with backticks.
  • Line 65: There should be a space in between the = and ''.
  • Line 77: "tine" should be "time".
  • Lines 35 and 84: Since the + operator is actually used in this approach, it would be clearer if usages of "+" in the prose were replaced with "and" or "plus".

• backward-iteration-with-range/content.md:

  • Line 7: #For should probably be replaced with # <-- For.
  • Lines 13 and 34: "-->" should be replaced with "to".
  • Line 18 is a bit confusing, adding parentheses around the "mentioned in the iteration and concatenation approach" would help.
  • Lines 34 and 35 seem to be wrong. This variant is still appending, not prepending.
  • Line 51: There should be an "it" in between "but" and "becomes".
  • Line 52: "is not strictly repetition and length constrained" is very confusing, I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to mean.

[Yrahcaz7]

Addressed in PR #4226:

Reverse String Dig Deeper audit (part 2 of 2)

• introduction.md:

  • Line 80: The period should probably be removed, as it is a header, not a sentence.
  • Line 88: There should probably be a space in between the , and codepoint.
  • Lines 99, 113, 116, 127, etc.: Terms missing backticks.
  • Line 146: "and or" should be "and/or".
  • Line 146 is missing a period at the end.
  • Line 159: "intput" should be "input".

• list-and-join/content.md:

  • Line 6: The hyphen should probably be replaced with "to" or "or".
  • Line 14: There should probably be a space in between the , and codepoint.
  • Line 19: "O(1)" should be surrounded with backticks.
  • Line 24: "Range" should be "range()".
  • Line 24: "list.append()" should be surrounded with backticks.
  • Line 42: "range()" should be surrounded with backticks.
  • Line 42: "over 1/2" should probably be "Over Half".
  • Lines 48, 52, and 74: There is no space in between the # and the comment.
  • Line 58: The usage of "a median" is confusing here, maybe use "the midpoint" (or similar) instead?
  • Line 61 is a bit confusing, maybe "each force iteration over" should be "both iterate over".
  • Line 82: More variables missing backticks.
  • Line 104: There is an extra space in between "an" and "UnicodeDecodeError". Also, should this "an" be an "a"? It reads more naturally with an "a", but I'm not sure which is correct.

• built-in-list-reverse/content.md:

  • Title: The period should probably be removed, as it is a title/header, not a sentence.
  • Line 13: "loop + append" should probably be "loop and list.append()" for clarity.
  • Line 19: There should be a comma in between "None" and "as".
  • Line 47 has three spaces of indentation instead of four.

• built-in-reversed/content.md:

  • Title: The period should probably be removed, as it is a title/header, not a sentence.
  • The variant being in introduction.md (and not having a header of its own in built-in-reversed/content.md) is confusing, especially because it does not use str.join(), which is in the header for the approach in introduction.md.
  • The first code block has unnecessary parentheses.

• additional-approaches/content.md:

  • Line 26: There should be a space in between the + and 1.
  • Some comments are missing a space after the #.
  • Line 31 would be clearer if the "or" was a "/" instead.
  • Many terms are missing backticks.
  • Line 43: "the code below" should be "the next approach" for clarity.
  • What is stniopedoc supposed to mean? It doesn't seem like a good variable name.
  • Line 65: "into a the" should be "into the".
  • Line 70: "almost" should be "slightly", as "almost slower" implies that it is slightly faster.
  • Line 88: "slice + concatenation" should be "slice plus concatenation" for clarity.
  • Line 90: Wouldn't it be O(n**2) space complexity (where n is the length of the string)?
  • Line 95: lambbda should be lambda.
  • Line 95: Join() should be join().
  • Lines 99 and 110: The parentheses around -x-1 are unnecessary.
  • Line 106: "to O(n)" should be removed, it was already O(n) (even though it was less efficient).
  • Line 127: There should be a comma in between "issues" and "since".
  • Line 129: There should be an "it" in between "but" and "does".

• The performance article:

  • The snippet appears to be broken, it seems like both Github and the Exercism website fail to render the Markdown table properly.
  • Line 5: "six" should be "seven".
  • Line 15: "and a seventh approach using map()" should be "(for the 'other interesting approaches' category, the map() approach will be used)"

@BethanyG, Can I open a PR to fix these?

[BethanyG]

@Yrahcaz7 - apologies. 😅 I was out today running errands and food shopping, so didn't get to this until now. Since I wrote this set of approaches, I sorta feel obligated to correct them. But if you really want to PR them, have at it. 😄 💙