If I understand you correctly, you're talking about using nested loops to create all the possible combinations of letters matching your pattern, and then using those to search....something.

This is going to result in extremely large arrays of strings -- way more than "thousands." A six-letter pattern containing 3 Cs and 3 Vs will result in over a million words, while a pattern like CVCCVCVCV (matching 'configure') would create over 12 billion, requiring over 100GB of space just to hold them. And in each case, only a tiny percentage of them would be actual words. (The 'configure' pattern matches 1415 words in my /usr/share/dict/words, or .000011% of the possible letter combos.)

If you're looking for actual words, and not just random assortments of letters, it's very likely that you would be better off going the other direction -- start with a dictionary of valid words, which probably won't have more than a million entries, and search it for words that match your pattern.

Aaron B.
My Woefully Neglected Blog, where I occasionally mention Perl.

In reply to Re: variables from STDIN by aaron_baugher
in thread variables from STDIN by stigmatt

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