This library was created after my unsuccessful attempts to participate in the Google Code Jam competition using TypeScript.
Solutions must read from standard input (stdin), but node.js doesn't provide a user friendly way to do it. Even the official examples use a lot of boilerplate to construct a state machine handling the input. This resulted in me wasting 90% of my time dealing with the input instead of solving the algorithmic problems. Because of this I created this library that allows you to read from stdin using an intuitive async/await syntax.
You can add it to your JavaScript/TypeScript project with:
$ npm i stdin-line
# or
$ yarn add stdin-lineCreate a StdinLineStream object and use the methods getLine() and
getLineAsNumbers() to read from stdin. Both return promises and can be used
with async/await. After you are done close the stream with close(). If you
don't close the stream the application will continue listening for input and
never finish.
If you are using it for Google Code Jam you will need to submit only one file. In
this case the best solution is to use a tool like rollup
to boundle this library with your solution and submit it as one regular JavaScript
file. Rollup will require 2 other plugins (rollup-plugin-node-resolve and
rollup-plugin-commonjs) to be able to put everything together. An example of a
complete Google Code Jam qualification round solution can be found in the
examples folder.
Read 2 numbers from stdin and display the sum of them.
import { StdinLineStream } from "stdin-line";
(async function() {
let inputStream = new StdinLineStream();
let [a, b] = await inputStream.getLineAsNumbers();
console.log(a + b);
inputStream.close();
})();Some competitive programming challenges can be bound by stdin read performance. I'm not sure how big the overhead of this sync/awaits approach is. This needs to be further investigated.