Anyone here have suggestions for scrabblehooks (esp. in terms of speed increase) I'm very much a perl n00b and when a friend of mine presented me with this text problem, I thought perl, and struggled through to write it, but it was much slower than hoped for. Any suggestions? 


#!/usr/bin/perl
$op = shift @ARGV;

# load a list of valid words
unless ($op =~ /^S$/) {
 open WORDLIST, shift @ARGV;
 while (<WORDLIST>) {chomp;push @words, $_;}
 close WORDLIST;
} else {
 while(<>){push @correct;}
}

# find a list of possible words from the list of valid words
if ($op =~ /^P(.{0,2})(.)(.{1,})$/) {($otherop,$direction,$letter)=($1
+,$2,$3);
 for (@words) {
  if ($direction eq "F") {
   if (/\b($letter)/) {push @possible, $';}
  } elsif ($direction eq "B") {
   if (/($letter)\b/) {push @possible, $`;}
  }
 }
 if (!$otherop) {for(@possible){print "$_\n";}}
}

# check the list of possible words against the list of valid words
if ($op =~ /^(.?)C(S*)/) {$otherop = $2;
 if (!$1) {while(<>){push @possible, $_;}}
 for $word (@words) {
  for(@possible) {
   if ($word eq $_) {push @correct, $_;}
  }
 }
 if (!$otherop) {for(@correct){print "$_\n";}}
}

# sort the list of correct words by size (small to large) and then abc
if ($op =~ /^(.*)S/) {
 if ($op =~ /S$/) {while(<>){push @correct, $_;}}
 @sorted = sort { length $a <=> length $b or $a cmp $b } @correct;
 for(@sorted) {print "$_\n";}
}

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The problem is this: the input is a list of valid words - all letters of the same case, one word per line. The output is based on finding words which, when a letter is removed from the beginning is still a valid word e.g. a search for a front hook of A in a list containing AAH and AH searching would return AH as AAH - A in front = AH, which is in the list. Expand this to 26 letters and 54 lists and it took a significant amount of time to process a 1.6M list of valid words.

Any speed tips? or is that much processing just going to take a long time? (I split the job up among 4x2GHz computers and it took about 8 hours to generate all of the lists)

Source, inputs and outputs

In reply to speedier text matching by lemnar

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