Faster way to do this?

[Sami Hangaslammi]

Freddie <oinkfreddie at oinkmadcowdisease.oinkorg> wrote in message news:<Xns938295DE13BC1freddiethescaryeleph at 203.10.110.105>...
> Hi.
> 
> I was quite bored today, so I hacked up a quick Python script to do.. well, 
> I'm not sure what it's called. You're given a set of letters ('olhel', for 
> example), and you're supposed to come up with a bunch of words that use only 
> those letters. In this case, it might be ('he', 'hell', 'hello', 'hoe', 
> 'hole', 'oh'). Just wondering if there's any way to make it faster, perhaps 
> using a bizarre list comprehension :)


def method2(chars, words):
    found = 0
    letters = {}
    for c in chars:
        letters[c] = letters.get(c,0)+1
    for word in words:
        wletters = {}
        for c in word:
            if c not in letters:
                break
            wletters[c] = wletters.get(c,0)+1
            if wletters[c] > letters[c]:
                break
        else:
            found += 1
    return found

$ python2.2 wordfinder.py hel
Read 45392 words in 0.38s
Method 1: found 1 words in 1.38s
Method 2: found 1 words in 0.22s

$ python2.2 wordfinder.py hello
Read 45392 words in 0.38s
Method 1: found 6 words in 1.62s
Method 2: found 6 words in 0.23s

$ python2.2 wordfinder.py hellosapfoijaspginapgisngpdind
Read 45392 words in 0.38s
Method 1: found 1475 words in 3.65s
Method 2: found 1475 words in 0.46s