Sudoku Solver

A blazing fast sudoku solver made in Go, supporting text and image input and output.

Description

Provide an unsolved soduku (either in form of a screenshot, from a file or directly from the console) and have this program solve it and produce the output in many different formats!

How to use

Before being able to run the script, either download the last release, clone the repo or build it from source. Then open the terminal and navigate to the folder containing the executable file.

• Load sudoku from a file called sudoku-1.png and save it into another image called solved.png: sudoku-solver --imageinput sudoku-1.png --imageoutput solved.png
• Load sudoku from console and print it in terminal: sudoku-solver --stringinput --4-6--13-5-------6-3-----2-9---473--------8---2-1---94---------7---59----12----7 --stringoutput
• Load sudoku from file called sudoku-unsolvable.txt and save it to a file called sudoku-solved.txt: sudoku-solver --fileinput sudoku-unsolvable.txt --fileoutput sudoku-solved.txt

Of course all the parameters can be mixed

• Load sudoku from a file called sudoku-extreme.txt and save it into an image called that-was-easy.png: sudoku-solver --fileinput sudoku-extreme.txt --imageoutput that-was-easy.png
• Load sudoku from an image called another-sudoku.png and print it into terminal: sudoku-solver --imageinput another-sudoku.png --stringoutput

Commands

Complete list of commands:

Command	Description	Notes
-h --help	Show help
--version	Show current version
--fileinput	Load sudoku from file	Line breaks are not necessary, use "-" or "0" as placeholder for empty cells
--fileoutput	Write solved sudoku in file	Will be written in a prettified way unless --plaintext flag is provided
--imageinput	Load sudoku from an image
--imageoutput	Write solved sudoku over image
--stringinput	Load sudoku from terminal	Write all in one line, use "-" or "0" as placeholder for empty cells
--stringoutput	Print solved sudoku in terminal
--plaintext	Print solved sudoku in plaintext	Only valid if used with --fileoutput or --stringoutput flags

Requirements

In order to run this program from source (or compile it), you need to have installed:

• Gcc compiler
• Tesseract OCR

Sample input and output

Image

Sample input

courtesy of sudoku.com

Sample outputs

• Text output:

-------------
|921|538|476|
|473|162|859|
|568|479|213|
-------------
|856|913|742|
|234|687|591|
|719|254|368|
-------------
|347|891|625|
|185|726|934|
|692|345|187|
-------------

• Image output:

• File output: (sample/solved-1.txt)

921538476473162859568479213856913742234687591719254368347891625185726934692345187

String

Sample input

String: --------8---29-65-1---73----31-----4---38----82----1---9-5-7---2------7------49--

Sample outputs

• Text output

-------------
|962|145|738|
|374|298|651|
|185|673|249|
-------------
|531|762|894|
|649|381|527|
|827|459|163|
-------------
|496|517|382|
|218|936|475|
|753|824|916|
-------------

• Image output:

• File output: (sample/solved-2.txt)

962145738374298651185673249531762894649381527827459163496517382218936475753824916

File

Sample input

File (sample/sudoku-3.txt)

-9---7----------457---8---6-----53---8------9--49---6-5-16---------4--1-------257

Sample outputs

• Text output

-------------
|496|157|832|
|218|396|745|
|753|284|196|
-------------
|962|415|378|
|185|763|429|
|374|928|561|
-------------
|531|672|984|
|827|549|613|
|649|831|257|
-------------

• Image output:

• File output: (sample/solved-3.txt)

496157832218396745753284196962415378185763429374928561531672984827549613649831257

Todo

I would really like to implement my own method to detect numbers, either via some kind of image processing analysys or by using neural network. It's kind of a long term project tho, it won't be done until a reasonably long time.

License

This project is distributed under CC 4.0 License.