Like from a phone number..

Just for fun (and well, my wife asked me for it).
Easily converted to CGI

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#Numbers to letters v2

use strict;
my $count = 0;

my $wlist = "/usr/dict/words";
open (WLIST, "<$wlist") || die "Unable to open $wlist: $!";
my @words = <WLIST>;
my %nums =(   #numbers to letters
    1 => ["L"],
    2 => ["A","B","C"],
    3 => ["D","E","F"],
    4 => ["G","H","I"],
    5 => ["J","K","L"],
    6 => ["M","N","O"],
    7 => ["P","Q","R","S"],
    8 => ["T","U","V"],
    9 => ["W","X","Y","Z"],
    0 => ["O"],
);

print "Please enter the numbers - between 2 and 9\n";
print "Note that 1's will convert to L's and 0's to O's\n: ";
chomp (my $key=<STDIN>);
my @keys=split "",$key;
my $length = scalar @keys;

#call the sub, let it know which letter in the word we are looking at,
#which letters we are looking for and the wordlist -
#this keeps going until there are no more numbers to check 

#this is seperate to give it the "first" list (faster this way)
my $words = &get_wrds($count,$nums{shift @keys},\@words,$length);
++$count;
foreach (@keys){
    $words=&get_wrds($count,$nums{$_},$words);
    ++$count;
}
foreach (@{$words}){ 
    #there should only be a couple of N letter words left..
    print "Found $_\n"; 
}

sub get_wrds{
    my $pos   = shift; #position in the word
    my $list  = shift; #list of letters
    my $wlist = shift; #list of words
    my $lng   = shift; #length
    my @words;         #temp storage
    foreach my $let(@{$list}){ 
        foreach (@{$wlist}){
            chomp;
            if ($lng){  #get rid of irrelevant words
                next unless length $_ == $lng;
            }
            if ( index(uc $_,$let,$pos) == $pos){ 
                push @words,$_;             
            }
        }
    }
    return \@words; #return matches
}
[download]

FWIW this is a revisit of a very early script of mine. That one was plain ugly - due to indentation the foreach loops were marching right off the page :-) - plus it only did 4 numbers. I was curious when I first finished this as to which of the 2 was faster. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the ugly bad code that I had written before was much quicker. Hence some of the optimizations (ie: passing references instead of arrays, skipping non N length words etc). This code now runs faster :-).

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