Jeremy Kister wrote:
> I'm wondering how others could write to code so that it'd
> find words faster.
You don't say where the speed problem is. There are two
distinct parts to your script. Loading the dictionary and
finding the scrambled word.
The scrambling algorithm depends on splitting every same
length word in the dictionary into a character array and then
comparing each character against the characters in the
selected word or words.
A better choice might compare entire words. You could
massage the dictionary entries in another script into a hash
with two words for each entry. The second entry would contain
all the words of each alphabetized letter arrangement.
Assuming these are the only 3 letter words in the dictionary,
each entry might look like this.
aet => [ 'ate', 'tea', 'eta', ],
art => [ 'rat', 'tar', 'art', ]
foo => [ 'foo' ],
Store the dictionary hash with Storable or with DBM::Deep
and access it as a hash in the guessing part of the script.
In the data massaging script we might use this to stuff words
into the hash (warning: untested code). Note that this code
only needs to be run when the dictionary changes, not each
time the scramble script runs.
use strict;
use warnings;
use Storable 'store';
my $dir = "$ENV{'HOME'}/data/dictionary/";
opendir my $dh, $dir or die qq(Cannot open "$dir": $!);
my( %dictionary, $word_count );
foreach my $file ( grep {/^english-word/} readdir $dh ){
open my $fh, "$dir$file" or next;
while ( my $word = <$fh> ) {
next if $word =~ /[^a-z]/;
chomp $word;
my $alpha = join '', sort split //, $word;
push @{ $dictionary{ $alpha } }, $word;
$word_count++;
}
}
close $dh;
store( \%dictionary, 'scramble.db' );
# Feedback.
printf
"Stored %s words in %s keys\n",
$word_count,
scalar keys %dictionary;
__END__
Assuming the dictionary hash is in "scramble.db", we might
do something like this (warning: untested code).
use strict;
use warnings;
use Storable 'retrieve';
# This loads the special dictionary.
my $dictionary = retrieve( 'scramble.db' );
while (1) {
print 'word: ';
chomp( my $scramble = <STDIN> );
last if $scramble eq 'q';
( my $alpha = $scramble ) =~ s/\s+//g;
# test this to see what it does.
$alpha = join '', sort split //, lc $alpha;
if ( defined $dictionary->{$alpha} ) {
if ( @{ $dictionary->{$alpha} } ) {
print "\n";
foreach my $word ( @{ $dictionary->{$alpha} } ) {
next if $word eq $scramble;
print "$word\n";
}
print "\n";
} else {
print qq(Sorry, I cannot scramble "$scramble".\n\n);
}
} else {
print qq(Sorry, I cannot scramble "$scramble".\n\n);
}
}
__END__
HTH,
Charles K. Clarkson
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