Just to clarify, I'm not a computer science student and my deadline is not a class deadline. I'm an artist with a background in mathematics, and I also occasionally publish crosswords and other word puzzles. My sense was that Perl and regular expressions could be enormously helpful in the latter, so I've been teaching myself with the O'Reilly book, but haven't learned enough yet to solve on my own a particular matching question that I could really use an answer to in the next few days, as it's to do with a printer deadline for a puzzle that I'm writing for my best friend's wedding.

Thanks for these thoughts on the spell-checking approach. The code looks enormously interesting but obviously a lot to work through, and maybe more than I need at the moment? The solutions above appear to be able to tackle my specific problem, but perhaps there is something I'm not seeing.

In reply to Re^2: Comparing Lines within a Word List by dominick_t
in thread Comparing Lines within a Word List by dominick_t

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