Help me..

There's so many haters!  

As I said, was just offering an answer to someone who said they were stuck, in the hope of helping, not proposing super efficient power coding as an entry into a coding competition.

That made me laugh !

In my opinion, your solution is good. There's a lot of reasons why you can be stuck with crappy input. It's a simple solution to get out of that mess without rewriting the crap generator!