http://blog.vrplumber.com/427
your alterations would be to check for length == to length - number-of-wildcards (with the wildcards removed from the translation table, of course) and then some tweaks to the "expensive" loop to allow for up to wildcard-count ValueErrors. There's some (informal) analysis in the comments of that post regarding why its a fairly good mechanism for searching large sets of words.
HTH, Mike
Case Nelson wrote: ...
Basically, the program needs to take in a random list of no more than
10 letters, and find all possible mutations that match a word in my
dictionary (80k words). However a wildcard letter '?' is also an
acceptable character which increases the worst case time significantly.
So if the letters are ['a','b','c'] check a, b, c, ab, ac, ba, bc, ca,
cb, abc, acb, bac, bca, cab, cba where only a, ba and cab would be
added to the dict of words. If the letters are ['?','?'] check a-z, aa,
ab, ac, ad, ..., az, ba, bb, bc, bd, ..., zz
...
________________________________________________ Mike C. Fletcher Designer, VR Plumber, Coder http://www.vrplumber.com http://blog.vrplumber.com
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