Country, Company, Competitor (Solution)

Hiya Puzzlers! After a total fail last week, I'm back with a solution for this week's puzzle. That's your spoiler alert---solution is at the end of this post.

I didn't post a preview this week, so I'll do a full breakdown here. Let's see this week's Sunday Puzzle:

This week's challenge comes from listener Peter Collins, of Ann Arbor, Mich. Think of a country. Embedded in consecutive letters is a well-known brand name. The first, second, eighth and ninth letters of the country, in order, spell a former competitor of that brand. Name the country and the brands.

This is quite similar to the puzzle we solved two weeks ago. In that puzzle, there was a Japanese food embedded in the name of a US city, and then the remaining letters could be used to spell a Mexican food. The first part is very similar, but we don't have the unscrambling spelling part this time. So I started my solver script for the current puzzle by recycling the city/foods puzzle solver script.

To solve this puzzle we need:

• C: a list of countries;
• This is easy enough to find online, but we've already got this list on hand from previous puzzles; I'm lazily pasting it into my python solver script, i.e., hard coding it;
• Pro-tip: you'll want to be flexible with what you accept in your list and include variant names; e.g., "Côte d'Ivoire" and "Ivory Coast" and "Republic of Côte d'Ivoire";
• We'll also want to ASCII-fy this list: e.g., "Côte d'Ivoire" --> "Cote d'Ivoire";
• I do this in the solver script with slugify, which also lowercases letters;
• And we'll want to remove any non-letters: "cote d'ivoire" --> "cotedivoire";
• And we know we need at least 9 letters, so we'll go ahead and filter any shorter strings out of our list;
• B: a list of brands;
• I cobbled one together from various lists on the web; I also hard coded directly this into my solver script;
• We'll want to handle these similarly to the country names: ASCII-fy, remove whitespace and non-letters, and lowercase everything;

From here, there's not a lot of processing to do. Basically, we check each country in C to see if any brand in B appears as a substring, and when we find a match, we get the first, second, eighth and ninth letters of the country, concatenate them in order to get the competitor (all as specified above in the puzzle), and then check to see if the competitor string appears in the list of brands. It's like this:

• for country in C:
• for brand in B:
• if brand in country:
• competitor = country[0]+country[1]+country[7]+country[8]
• if competitor in B:
• print("Solution: "country+" & "+brand+" & "+competitor)

And that's how I solved it! See my script and if you want to see more. I'm posting the solution below.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Saudi Arabia, Audi, Saab