Zaxo,
This is very similar to the idea I had. I discovered that compiling the offsets using
DBM::Deep was extremely slow, but was fast for subsequent runs. This also has the advantage of not requiring the dictionary file to be sorted.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use DBM::Deep;
open(my $dict, '<', 'words.raw') or die "Unable to open 'words.raw' fo
+r reading: $!";
my $db = DBM::Deep->new("offsets.db");
build_db($db, $dict) if ! scalar keys %$db;
for my $char ('a' .. 'z') {
for (1 .. 100) {
print get_rand_word($db, $char, $dict);
}
}
sub build_db {
my ($db, $dict) = @_;
my $pos = tell $dict;
while ( <$dict> ) {
my $char = substr($_, 0, 1);
push @{$db->{$char}}, $pos;
$pos = tell $dict;
}
}
sub get_rand_word {
my ($db, $char, $dict) = @_;
my $offset = $db->{$char}[rand @{$db->{$char}}];
seek $dict, $offset, 0;
my $word = <$dict>;
return $word;
}
Other options include
Storable and
DBD::SQLite if a
real RDBMS isn't available.