On 9 Mar 2011, at 03:01, Ben Lavery wrote: > I shall change from a hash to an array and use grep, or looking into it I may > use List::MoreUtils as it has a "first_value" sub which should make it > somewhat more efficient.
OK, so about an hour after I wrote this I was on the train home thinking "stupid idiot". If I use "first_value" from List::MoreUtils then there is no point me in using wildcards for searching... I have tried using grep, but with the number of elements I have, it's taking forever...On my Mac Pro it's taking more than ten minutes (I gave up after that). My thoughts are: if @letters have one or more wildcards in ( . ) Generate all combinations of a-z (permutations don't matter at this stage) for wildcards For each combination generated above Add combination to temp array containing other entries from @letters Generate all combinations and permutations of this temp array, store results in @all_possible_combinations For each $element in @all_possible_combinations Does $element appear in %word_list I've just got to work out the Perl now :P Ben