So you have a looming deadline and no idea how to solve your problem (every CS problem can be solved "using regular expressions in a Perl script"), so you come here to ask us to do your homework for you... well today is your lucky day :-P

My first thought was "spell checker", so I investigated how they work. Apparently one possible implementation is the use of a Trie. I've never worked with a trie before, so I decided to use this chance to try it out. Since it's the first time I'm working with tries, the code might have some bugs. I compared it to a plain, brute-force linear search regex match. In my first tests, the trie data structure takes roughly 5x the memory (as reported by Devel::Size), but on large word lists I saw a 100x to 700x speedup. (Note: My implementation of AnomalousMonk's xor+tr search seems to be roughly twice as fast as the regex implementation.)

If you want to understand what's going on in the code, the book Learning Perl is a good start, as is perldsc. Also, ask here.

(Protip: Don't get thrown out of your class or school for plagiarism and cite your sources.)

<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

In reply to Re: Comparing Lines within a Word List by Anonymous Monk
in thread Comparing Lines within a Word List by dominick_t

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