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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

It’s more than that. ChatGPT actually gave the right answer but they chose not to use it to make a point.

Not quite right... as there would still be 3 failures in the tests, like Haskel.

Realistically, I would expect to have a couple different methods available... one that split a string into groups of code segments that represent a single unit, and a display width of units (0-2). Alternatively another method that just counted the display width in numbers of character spaces (assuming mono-spacing). Then you could apply the padding more naturally.

The grouping of characters would be more for other tests for display beyond left padding.

They were definitely trying to make Rust look worse than it is. They even sarcastically acknowledge that:

> I didn’t deliberately pick the one which made Rust look even worse than all the others, out of peevish resentment for every time someone has rewritten some Python code (my go-to language) in Rust and made it a million times faster – that’s a ridiculous suggestion.

And

> Rust, as expected, gets nul points. What can I say?

Found it... Counting display width[1], getting unicode segments[2].

    1. https://crates.io/crates/unicode-display-width
    2. https://crates.io/crates/unicode-segmentation

To be fair, you'd have to also import this crate to get the result he wanted:

https://docs.rs/unicode-segmentation/latest/unicode_segmenta...

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