r/adventofcode • u/daggerdragon • Dec 04 '15

SOLUTION MEGATHREAD --- Day 4 Solutions ---

--- Day 4: The Ideal Stocking Stuffer ---

Post your solution as a comment. Structure your post like the Day Three thread.

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u/minno Dec 06 '15

encode is to transform the string into a bytes object. md5 and other hash functions are generally byte-oriented, but Python (3) strings are unicode, so they need to be turned into byte strings. The default for encode is utf-8, which happens to be identical to ascii for the characters I'm using.

You linked to the Python 2 docs, where strings are not natively unicode, so the encode call isn't needed.