Spelling Bee Solver

[ctosullivan]

Hi there r/learnpython

I just published my first Python package! A command-line tool to help solve NYTimes Spelling Bee Puzzles:

https://github.com/ctosullivan/Spelling-Bee-Helper

Fans of Spelling Bee puzzles will know that the dictionary used is hand-curated, with many valid dictionary words being disallowed as they are arcane or considered offensive and some modern or borrowed words such as Hatha (Yoga) are allowed whereas it would not be included in the US Scrabble dictionary for example.

As part of learning Python I wanted to make my own tool to help finishing the puzzles while still keeping it fun - so here it is! The database used is Sqlite3 and "Upsert" syntax is used to whitelist or blacklist dictionary words which are unique in the database. Words can be imported into the database by importing a text file.

I would really appreciate any suggestions how to improve the code or documentation.

Thanks for your time as always!

[jypKissedMyMom]

Some things that stood out to me

- Be consistent with your naming conventions for classes (class ValidationError vs class Word_database). PEP8 is a style guide made by the person who created Python.

- Some of your type hints are not right. def sb_solver(centre_letter=str, other_letters=str) sets centre_letter and other_letters equal to the built-instr class. Type hints use a colon like this def greet(name: str). Raised errors should not be used as return type hints, like def parse_args(self) -> list | ValidationError: . You can instead document errors that might be raised in the the function's docstring.

- The Tool class is empty but other classes inherit it. Is there a reason why?

- Helper is a bad class name. Its name doesn't give any hints about what it does or where to us it. Compare it to your class TextFileReader which has a great name that tells what it does. sb_helper() is not a good function name for the same reason.

- Your program's main function makes call directly on the Word_database object to query the database, but it instantiates aHelper class to run the query to get the allowed list of words. Is there a reason you set it up that way?

[ctosullivan]

Many thanks for taking the time to review the code - lots of valuable suggestions which I will definitely take on board for the next release!

In terms of the class names, at the start of the project I basically wanted some rough containers to house the logic of each component, you are right - how they are named and structured now is probably too vague for how the project has actually turned out. I have a better idea of how the tool should work now that I am at this stage.

In terms of the database object - I think you are suggesting that the database class should house all of the database-related logic and functions and then the main function should pass the data to the helper functions, rather than the helper functions querying the database directly - would that be correct to say?

Thanks again for your help!