Kattis Grind

A small easy-to-use package of Python 3 scripts which can help speed up the process for competitive programming on Kattis. The scripts will download a local copy of the question (html file), and can automate testing inputs / outputs.

Requirements

Kattis Grind uses Python 3. To check if you have it:

foo@bar:~$ python3 --version
Python 3.7.3

If you don't have Python 3, you can install it from the Python Website.

The Kattis Grind setup requires two modules. To install them:

foo@bar:~$ pip3 install bs4
foo@bar:~$ pip3 install fake-useragent

How do I use it?

Fetch a question!

Simple! If you wanted to fetch a question, you can simply run

foo@bar:~/kattis-grind$ ./fetch.py
Enter ID:

If you prefer to use command line arguments instead, you can! For example, if I wanted to get question 'hello':

foo@bar:~/kattis-grind$ ./fetch.py --id hello

Test your solution!

The useful feature for Kattis Grind is that you can easily test your solutions! To do so:

foo@bar:~/kattis-grind$ ./test.py
Enter ID:

Similarly to fetching a question, you can pass in an optional ID argument! Using 'hello' as an example again:

foo@bar:~/kattis-grind$ ./test.py --id hello

Generating random questions!

The best feature of this program is that you can fetch random questions from Kattis too! If I was interested in five questions between a range of 1.4 to 1.6, I can run the script like this:

foo@bar:~/kattis-grind$ ./rand.py
Enter lower bound: 1.4
Enter upper bound: 1.6
How many questions: 5

It's as simple as that! But as you may have guessed, there are optional command line arguments for these too! Although they're less useful, you can use them like this:

foo@bar:~/kattis-grind$ ./rand.py --lobound 1.4 --upbound 1.6 --qamount 5

Depending on how many questions you want, and what range they're between, this operation may take several seconds (sometimes a good 10 - 40 seconds!!). Keep in mind that while it takes long, it definitely works!

Current Bugs

Currently, Windows seems to have some trouble with encoding characters and Python crashes as a result of trying to save HTML files without proper encoding. This does not occur on Linux. Be wary of questions with foreign characters in them, for example: ő

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

• Thanks to JarateKing and Ben Boyle for the original grinding idea.
• Thanks to Will Taylor for fixing test.py to work on Windows machines.
• Thanks to the UPEI SMCSS for all the motivation!!!