A Sudoku Importer

News!

Sadly, my Palm TX broke, and I used the warranty money to get an iPod Touch instead of another Palm, and so I don't have a good way (or the motivation ;) to continue developing this program. If anyone wants to take over the source code, I'ld be happy to provide them with Subversion access, and continue to host the app here, or add a pointer to the new location on this page.

Description

The Sudoku Importer is a program which takes a set of Sudoku puzzles in a memo, and imports them all into Andrew Gregory's Sudoku program for the Palm. The format of Sudoku puzzles should be as follows:
% Sudoku From Wikipedia
53..7....
6..195...
.98....6.
8...6...3
4..8.3..1
7...2...6
.6....28.
...419..5
....8..79
Note that the title must start with "% ", which gets removed when the puzzle is imported.

How, you may ask, does one get Sudoku puzzles in this format into my Palm's Memo Pad? Conveniently, I have a program written in Python which will hit a site and download a configurable number (currently 20) of their puzzles, outputting them in the above format. However, the site I was getting the puzzles from asked me to not use them as a Sudoku source, and so I'm in the middle of updating the program to get its puzzles from another site. And while I was doing that, someone pointed a program out to me that would generate Sudoku puzzles, so I think I'll use that instead.

Yet-to-be-implemented Features

• Handle the case where the Sudoku program is on a memory stick. (Thanks, Ben Cordes.)
• Figure out what's causing the "Query Error" messages. (Thanks, Greg Balls.)
• Add some more in-app documentation/help.
• Please email me with any suggestions.

Yet-to-be-fixed Bugs

• Successful importing of puzzles can result in an error code of 9 or possibly 12, depending on whether there's a blank line at the end of your puzzles. I should really change that. (Thanks, Joan Fisbein.)
• Figure out what's causing the "Query Error" messages. (Thanks, Greg Balls.)

Download

You can download a copy of the latest version (0.7) of the Sudoku Importer here.

Changelog

Version 0.7 - 24/06/07 17:22

• Compiles on the TX! Also, imports every puzzle, instead of every second puzzle. (Thanks Matt Guyton, mainly for the inspiration to get it working again. ;)

Version 0.6 - 17/01/06 17:58

• Category support! Persistant, even. (Thanks, Greg Balls.)

Version 0.5 - 15/01/06 10:01

• Scroll list with hard keys. Also, import current menu when the middle key is pressed. Well, the middle key on the T|X, anyways. I'm not sure about other devices. (Thanks , Greg Balls.)
• Get it compiling under GCC (or, more accurately, g++). (Thanks, Dave McKienzie.)
• Show the version (with the build date) on the about page.

Version 0.4 - 09/01/06 14:42

• Import puzzles generated from Michael Kennett's sudoku generator. (Note that I'm actually using a patched version of the sudoku generator, so be sure to download it from the "sudoku generator" link above, and don't forget to grab the template file and put it in the same directory as you saved "sudoku.exe" into with the name "template" (no extension). My patched version can be run as "sudoku -p1 -g5 -f compact > puzzles.txt" to get puzzles 1 to 5.) (Thanks, Ben Cordes and Ing. Jesús Cantú.)
• Add an "Import" button, and align the text. (Thanks, Tom Grydeland)
• Show the number of puzzles imported.
• Print out better messages, both error and success.
• Rework the puzzle parsing to correctly handle the cases below. (Thanks, Dave McKienzie.)

Version 0.3 - 19/12/05 17:00

• Added support for '0' instead of '.' as the empty cell (thanks, Mike Dunning).
• Added support for 1 line of 81 characters, instead of 9 lines of 9 characters (thanks, Mike Dunning).

Version 0.2 alpha 3 - 11/8/05 9:32

• Fixed the memory leaks, I think
• Fixed the T3 crash (thanks, Frédéric Crozat, and Mike Bock).
• Updated the code to use the latest version of Andrew's Sudoku program.

Version 0.1 - 26/07/2005 16:06

• Initial release!