[Tutor] anagram solving algorithm

[Danny Yoo]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Max Russell wrote:

> I'm going to sort the input word (i.e the anagram) then get all words of
> equal length to the anagram, sort them, then do a match. I'll return the
> original words (unsorted) for all those that match.

Hi Max,


Yup, that sounds exactly right.

One more trick to make this really fast is to do the letter-sorting on
your whole dictionary of words way in advance, even before getting the
input word


If you this preparation early on, and keep a separate "word -> sorted
word" file, then the anagram check becomes an exact-matching problem. And
Python dictionaries are designed to make exact matching fast:


###
>>> word_entries = { 'one' : 1,
...                  'two' : 2,
...                  'three' : 3 }
>>> 'one' in word_entries
True
>>> 'five' in word_entries
False
>>> word_entries['three']
3
###


Hope this helps!