Use "-" as a letter. At least in a prefilled square.

[erikstar]

Hi!

I was just about to create a board with exolve for the last week "Swedish National Radio: Melodikryss" and then try to write to The Swedish national Radio with a small feature request to use exolve instead of their own lousy system... I admit a bit naive... but one can try :-)

https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2078&artikel=723047

What I wanted to point out is two things they are missing: 1) Typing text in "turning words" doesn't "turn". 2) I wanted to use "linked clues". In this kinds of sound based crosswords it can be a bit difficult to remember all places on the board when the question is multi word solutions... it is hard to remember all the places on the board when the question is asked and the music starts. So the nice feature with linked clues marked on the board (as exolve has) should really help.

And now to my problem... as you see in the link for the last week puzzle, they sometimes use a prefilled square with a "-". It should be wonderful to have that character handled as a letter... at least in the exolve-grid. If I understand stuff the "-" is not any decorator -- at least not yet :-) So this first line should be super for me to use: "0000000-!00".

I understand that I could modify your last function with placing hyphens almost anywhere, but in this case where I want to convince "them" about how simple to convert to exolve -- it would be great if it was just simple :-)

/Erik S

[viresh-ratnakar]

I have a an exolve-option ("allow-digits") to allow having numerals in grids. I can add a similar exolve-option to add arbitrary letters to the set of allowed letters. So you will then do something like:

exolve-option: allow-chars:-

However, doing it this way will also allow solvers to type a "-" in any square. Does that work for these puzzles?

[erikstar]

Yes please! That would be perfect!

[erikstar]

But now I realize it would be some kind of contradiction with your special handling of "0". But if you go "all in" for the change to "?" instead of "0" I guess it should work.

[erikstar]

But I could really live with your suggested "exolve-option: allow-chars:" and just use some other unicode version of hyphen...

[erikstar]

Or use a "space" and use your new function "addCellText" for the hyphen.

[viresh-ratnakar]

I've (finally!) added the allow-chars option in v1.08. Here's the documentation:

• allow-chars:<chars> If this option is specified, then we allow solvers to enter any of the characters (which would typically be special characters or digits) listed in <chars>. For example, allow-chars:#!7 will allow the characters #, !, and 7 to be used in the grid and will allow users to type them. If any of these special characters is also a decorator or is a character with a special meaning in grid specifications (i.e., one of |_+@!~*.?), then to specify it in the grid, you have to prefix it with &.

I also changed the implementation of dealing with 0 and 1 when allowed through allow-digits (making that use the same code as allow-chars)