Quote Originally Posted by clabulis View Post
My solution for License Plates is really bothering me. I feel like there's a much better way to solve it than the brute force method that I used. Hopefully someone can figure out a trick for this one!
I really don't believe that a more concise approach is available for the License Plates challenge.

The two criteria are sufficiently different to make a single approach unfeasible. What's more, since the array in question is already two-dimensional, any attempts at querying - en masse - individual characters within all strings within that array will run into the obvious problem of running out of "dimensions": for example, attempting to abbreviate e.g.:

=SUM(MID(G2:P26,4,1)+MID(G2:P26,5,1)+MID(G2:P26,6,1))

using a compound formula along the lines of:

=SUM(0+MID(G2:P26,{4,5,6},1))

would, in effect, require the "construction" of a three-dimensional grid to hold the relevant returns.

Of course, we can first manipulate the range G2:P26 into a single-column or single-row array, so that the above construction is then viable, but since these challenges are all about minimizing formula length the cost here would simply be too high.

Regards