[Resolved] Alphabet County Challenge - GC76NEJ

Requesting a Checker for our new Challenge.
: Find a cache in US Counties where the county name starts with each respective letter of the alphabet.
Special considerations for Q, X and Z
X - Since there are no US Counties starting with the letter “X”, you must use a cache from a county that ends with the letter “X” suck as Knox Co.
Q – There are only 5 US Counties that start with “Q” and none that end with “Q”, so if you do not have a find in one of those 5 counties that start with “Q”, you may substitute a cache from a county with a Q anywhere in the county name such as Marquette Co.
Z – There are only 3 US Counties that start with Z and only 4 that end with “Z”. If you do not have a cache in a county that starts with “Z” you may substitute a county with “Z” anywhere in the county name such as Santa Cruz Co, or Ozark Co.
Of course having one of the actual counties starting with “Q” or “Z” will get extra recognition.

You cannot use the same county twice i.e. Any county used for the special considerations for Q, X, Z may not be used for another letter of the alphabet.

For purposes of this challenge the Virginia Independent Cities will be considered counties so feel free to drive into Galax for your qualifying find.

We meet the requirements for this challenge

There is no script that can accomodate for your three exceptions.
The are also no counties in the database which are ending with a "X".
All the counties are ending with ")".

If a new script needs to be made it would be better to know from your reviewer if he would accept such a challenge.

There is only one challenge like this online and that one has the uncommen letters Q, X and Y taken out. Z is a commen starting letter in the Nederlands and Germany.

Note has been sent to reviewer for his opinion. Do not understand your comment about "X", there are 38 US counties ending in X. If it helps we can provide a list of the counties for the special letters to bounce checker against.

In the database of PGC the counties are shown as
Appomattox County (VA)
Box Butte County (NE)
Box Elder County (UT)
Bronx County (NY)
Etc
This complecates the situation for a checker script

We should be able to build a checker that goes through 26 regexps and label each regexp a respective letter of the alphabet. For most of them the regexp will be states of string and the letter. For the rare letters they will be more complicated to take into account the state in parenthesis and the word parish or county.

This may need a new script but it should not be that difficult.

Quick question for the folks on here.

All counties in the US are either Parishes or Counties? Are there any other terms used?

I believe Alaska has some which are listed as Boroughs and Census Areas. The rest are counties, except the Parishs of Louisiana. Thank you

Our reviewer has agreed to the concept of this challenge. It has been quit a while since we have had any update on the progress of the checker. Status?
If there is a specific glitch, we would consider adjusting the criteria.

Howdy.

Sorry for the delay.

The challenge is that a cache/county can be in two camps. The first is the for the initial letter. The other is for Q or Z. While not the end of the world, it was the stumbling block.

Give this one a try. It is not perfect. It could use sorting and some of the checking logic is not perfect. However it passes all my test cases.

https://project-gc.com/Challenges//26957

We ran a bunch of area cachers and it seemed to work correctly for all we looked at.
Another great job by Sloth96. He succeeded on this checker when others said it was not possible. Thank you for your amazing skills on checkers.

Thank you fr your volunteer efforts.