The House of Santa Claus

Question

The House of Santa Claus

Note: This is the first challenge that I have attempted to set. It has been through the Sandbox however if you find something wrong with it please do not just downvote but leave a comment so that I can improve it.

Background

There is a old childrens puzzle where the challenge is to draw a box with a roof and a cross through the middle without lifting your pen from the paper or going over any line twice.

In Germany it is known as "das Haus des Nikolaus" or "The House of Santa Claus". I honestly can't remember what we used to call it. For anyone who is not familiar with the puzzle, full details are available here.

Here is an ASCII art representation of the house.

 /\
/__\
|\/|
|/\|
----

Challenge

Write a program or function to draw the House of Santa Claus in any language of your choice.

Sounds too easy? Well here's the catch. It must also output each stage of the drawing and comply with the rules of the puzzle. Your program is not required to take any input. The finished house must look exactly as shown above.

According to the site above there are 44 possible solutions. You may use any one of them. This is an ASCII art challenge so you are not required to calculate the solution but only to draw it.

Output

An example of the required output from one of the 44 solutions is shown below:

---- 

 \
  \
----

 __
 \
  \
----

  \
 __\
 \
  \
----

 /\
/__\
 \
  \
----

 /\
/__\
|\
| \
----

 /\
/__\
|\/
|/\
----

 /\
/__\
|\/|
|/\|
----

Rules

• I have added 1 extra newline between each expected output to try to make the requirements clearer. This is optional. Any number of blank lines between each output is allowed.
• Your output must consist only of the characters /,\,-,_, and space as shown above. Trailing spaces are allowed.
• Each line in your drawing must continue from the end of the previous line and you may not repeat any line.
• Standard loopholes prohibited.
• You are not required to output the rhyme mentioned in the above link.
• This is code golf so the shortest answer in bytes will be the winner.

Result

Some great answers and thanks and respect to all who posted. I did say lowest byte count but I have marked as top answer not just for that but also for the great explanation of the code. Nice one @Dennis.

Answer 1

Jelly, 40 39 36 bytes

“ḥ%DtƊVḍI’ḃ9W;“|_/-\/\|‘Ė¤y@\FỌ»⁶s4Y

Try it online!

How it works

“ḥ%DtƊVḍI’

is a bijective base-250 literal; each character corresponds to its code point in Jelly's code page. The result is the integer 13192938935880491074.

          ḃ9

converts the generated integer to bijective base 9, yielding the integer array
[9, 6, 7, 9, 6, 2, 2, 7, 1, 5, 3, 8, 1, 3, 5, 8, 4, 4, 4, 4]. The integers correspond to the order of the stroke, with the exception of 9, which indicates a space.

            W

wraps the generated array into a singleton array, which will be required to prepend it to the array we'll generate now.

              “|_/-\/\|‘Ė¤

works as follows. ¤ combines the two links to the left into a niladic chain. The first one, “|_/-\/\|‘ yields the code points of the specified characters, yielding [124, 95, 47, 45, 92, 47, 92, 124]. Then, Ė enumerates the code points, yielding
[[1, 124], [2, 95], [3, 47], [4, 45], [5, 92], [6, 47], [7, 92], [8, 124]]. The pair [n, c] means that the n^th stroke will be the ASCII character with code point c.

             ;

concatenates the generated arrays. The result is the array
[[9,6,7,9,6,2,2,7,1,5,3,8,1,3,5,8,4,4,4,4],[1,124],[2,95],[3,47],[4,45],[5,92],[6,47],[7,92],[8,124]].

                          y@\

performs a cumulative (i. e., showing all intermediate steps) reduce, using transliteration (y) with swapped arguments (@). In the first step, e.g., we replace each 1 in the original array with 124, which is the code point of the character |.

                             FỌ

flattens the result and replaces all code points with the corresponding ASCII characters. In all steps, this will generate some unprintable characters with code points 1 to 9.

                               »⁶

takes the character-wise maximum with the space character, replacing all unprintable characters with spaces.

                                 s4Y

splits the generated string into chunks of length four and joins them with a linefeed as separator.

Answer 2

Javascript (ES6), 119 116 96 92 91 bytes

for(i=8;i--;)console.log(`834
3554
2610
2160
7777`.replace(/./g,c=>'|/|/\\_\\- '[c<i?8:c]))

Answer 3

Batch, 356 344 341 337 bytes

@set s=@set "
%s%g=@goto 1
%s%r=
%s%c=
%s%u=|
%s%l=|
%s%f=
@for /l %%i in (1,1,7)do @call:%%i
%s%u=|\/|
%s%l=|/\|
%g%
:7
%s%u=|\/
%s%l=|/\
%g%
:6
%s%f=----
%g%
:5
%s%u=|\
%s%l=| \
%g%
:4
%s%c=/__\
%g%
:3
%s%r= /\
%s%c=/  \
%g%
:2
%s%r= /
%s%c=/
:1
@for %%l in ("%r%" "%c%" "%u%" "%l%" "%f%")do @echo(%%~l

Stupid Batch | quoting rules... if you want a | in a variable, you need to quote it with three ^s, so it's cheaper to use @ instead and substitute it on output, although to achieve this I have to start with the left wall. Line one has a trailing space. echo( is used because the r, c, and f variables could be empty and we don't want ECHO is off. printed.

Edit: Saved 12 bytes by using fallthrough for the last part. Saved 3 bytes by using a for loop to print each part, this means that I now use |s in my variables which makes the code slightly easier to read. Saved 4 bytes by using explicit @ characters instead of @echo off. I think starting with the left wall still requires the fewest bytes.

Answer 4

C, 118 bytes

main(){char *p,n;for(n='B';n++<'J';)for(p="ZFEAFDDEAGCHIAGHCIABBBBAA";*p;p++)putchar(" \n-\\_\\/|/|"[(*p<n)**p&15]);}

Answer 5

///, 112 bytes

/!/\/\///*/----
 !@/\\\\!$/ @@!^/
*@\/@@
@\/__@@
/*@
 $
*__
$
 $
*$
 __@
$
 $^$
 $^|@
|$^|@\/
|\/@^|@\/|
|\/@|
*

Try it online!

Answer 6

PHP, 98 95 bytes

inspired by Arnauld´s solution

for($i=8;$i--;)for($p=24;$p--;)echo"|/|/\\_\\- 
"[($c="977779061290162945539438"[$p])<$i?8:$c];

Note: The first code line has a trailing space.

Answer 7

PHP with GD, 348 338 bytes (not competing)

not exactly what was being asked for, but ...

function f($v,$w){global$x,$y,$i;imageline($i,$x,$y,$x=$v,$y=$w,1);ob_start();imagepng($i);$s=ob_get_clean();ob_end_clean();echo'<img src="data:image/png;base64,',base64_encode($s),'" > ';}$i=imagecreate($w=9,$h=$w+$z=$w/2);imagecolorallocate($i,255,255,255);f(--$w,$y=--$h);f(0,$z);f($w,$z);f($w/2,0);f(0,$z);f(0,$h);f($w,$z);f($w,$h);

save to file, call in a browser

breakdown

function f($v,$w)
{
    global$x,$y,$i;
    imageline($i,$x,$y,$x=$v,$y=$w,1);      // draw line, set end coords as new start coords
    ob_start();imagepng($i);$s=ob_get_clean();ob_end_clean();           // get image output
    echo'<img src="data:image/png;base64,',base64_encode($s),'" > ';    // print <img> tag
}
// calculate dimensions, create image, allocate background color (foreground implicitly black)
$i=imagecreate($w=9,$h=$w+$z=$w/2);imagecolorallocate($i,255,255,255);
// paint lines: implicit `$x=0`
f(--$w,$y=--$h);f(0,$z);f($w,$z);f($w/2,0);f(0,$z);f(0,$h);f($w,$z);f($w,$h);

To draw a larger house, change $w=9 to your desired width.