This is a great little program!

I couldn't resist speeding it up a bit. A commonly used trick in search engines is to shift everything to upper case.

Avoiding the i flag in the regular expression roughly doubles the speed, on my machine at least.

I also used Storable to create a slightly faster-loading dictionary. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Storable;

my $search_word = uc shift
   or die "search word required\n";

my @words = ();
my @dict;
my $rdict;
my $count = 0;
if (not -e 'words.sto') {
  open WORDS, '/usr/share/dict/words'
    or die "can't open words file\n";
  while (<WORDS>) {
    chomp;
    push @dict, uc $_;
  }
  close WORDS;
  $rdict= \@dict;
  store $rdict, 'words.sto';
}
else {
  $rdict= retrieve('words.sto');
}

for (@$rdict) {
  printf "%3d %s\n", ++$count, $_ if $search_word =~ /$_/;
}

[download]
It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

In reply to Re: Re: Finding dictionary words in a string. by toma
in thread Finding dictionary words in a string. by ehdonhon

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