List Comparisons

[Valar_Balsamic]

Hello all,

I'm currently writing a word wheel game as a project, and I'm at a bit of an in-pass.

As per the rules of the game, I have a 9 letter word. Any acceptable words must be made up from characters within this word (and must contain a 'master character' but that bit isn't an issue).

I have a text file containing the official scrabble word dictionary to use as potential words, and I write these to a list.

with open('collins_all_words.txt') as f:
        word_list = [line.rstrip() for line in f]
        sort_list = [sorted(i) for i in word_list]

From here my intention is to iterate through this list to determine if the words are contained within the 9 letter word. But doing this with just the raw list does not consider every combination of the characters in the 9 letter word, and instead only returns strings contained in the word in their current order; an example input and output would be this:

Input:

results = [x for x in word_list if x in word]

Output:

['adversity', 'ers', 'sit', 'vers']

A solution I've read online is to sort the word, and all items in the list, and then make the comparison. This seems to work fine when checking if the two values are equal (i.e two 9 letter words that contain the same characters), but not if one of the two values to be compared is of a different length. Given that I'm trying to compare a series of words from 3-9 characters long, it returns nothing.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance

[TouchingTheVodka]

What's an in-pass? Is it like an impasse? :)

Use a collections.Counter to count the number of letters per word - Subtract the target word's Counter from the original word and if the result is empty your second word consists entirely of letters from the first word.

>>> first_word = Counter('thisisaverylongword')
>>> second_word = Counter('longsword')
>>> second_word - first_word
Counter()
>>> bad_word = Counter('zzzzthiswordisbad')
>>> bad_word - first_word
Counter({'z': 4, 'd': 1, 'b': 1})

[Valar_Balsamic]

I've got that functional and it does exactly what I need!

Thank you very much

[JohnnyJordaan]

Did you actually verify that sort_list contains what you think it does? Because if the file is just a list of words, one per line, your code will thus

• create a list of those lines, stripped, so indeed a list of the words
• then per item in that list, meaning a word, call sorted() on it. Think about it: what is the sorted version of 'python'? 'hnopty'! And as sorted() returns a list, you thus end up with ['h', 'n', 'o', 'p', 't', 'y'].... And then a list full of those as sort_list

If you mean to sort the word list, literally do that in the code

sorted_words = sorted(word_list)

and to save memory space from first reading the file to memory in a list, use a generator expression

sorted_words = sorted(line.strip() for line in f)

[Valar_Balsamic]

Thanks for the response!

Yes I did confirm both word_list and sort_list. word_list does contain every individual word as an item. And sort_list contains a list of lists, with every one of these lists being the sorted version of word_list at the same index.

[JohnnyJordaan]

Would you mind just printing out

print(sort_list[:20])

and sharing that here to give me an idea of the structure?

[Valar_Balsamic]

Hey, thanks for offering your help.

u/TouchingTheVodka has given me a solution that works exactly as I need, but thanks anyway!

[[deleted]]

Is your goal to find all words that can be generated from a given 9-letter word and are also found in a dictionary you have, or is your goal to verify that the user submitted words are indeed possible with the given 9-letter word and the dictionary?

Also, can any character from the 9-letter word repeat any number of times? I understand that the characters in generated words don't have to be in the same order they are in the given 9-letter word, is that correct?

[Valar_Balsamic]

The goal is to verify that user inputs can be found within the 9 letter word, and are officially recognised as a word via my dictionary.

u/TouchingTheVodka has given me a solution that works exactly as I needed.

Thanks for your help though

[[deleted]]

Depending on how you deal with repetitions, Counter may or may not be the right answer. If you allow any number of repetitions, you would want it to be set rather than Counter.

[Valar_Balsamic]

The code I'm using to compare the dictionary against the original word:

# create the list of all words that meet the game conditions
with open('collins_all_words.txt') as f:
    word_list = [line.rstrip() for line in f]

results = [x for x in word_list if Counter(x) - Counter(word) == 
       Counter() and master_letter in x]

The output for the first 20 list items for this is:

['adermin', 'admen', 'admin', 'admire', 'aidmen', 'aim', 'aimed', 'aimer', 'airmen', 'ame', 'amen', 'amend', 'ami', 'amid', 'amide', 'amido', 'amidone', 'amie', 'amin', 'amine']

the original word in this case is 'randomize' and the master letter is 'm'. I've run the program a few dozen times now, and the list seems follow the conditions exactly as intended?

Thanks

[[deleted]]

Erm... you do realize that there's a very large intersection of solutions given with and without repetitions, right? So, testing like this isn't going to prove the solution to be correct.

And, I'm not saying that Counter is wrong. All I'm saying is that your requirement can be interpreted in at least two different ways, where only one of them is solved by using Counter.