If you want to find matching real words many times, I'd suggest building a hash of your dictionary first.

Foreach word in the dictionary, check the letters in sequence, and browse your way down a three-way hash. Add that word to an array at the end of the path.

EG: When you get to "apple", follow: 

my $pos = $dictionary;
#this would be a loop of course.
$pos = $pos->{vowel}; # The A
$pos = $pos->{cons}; # First P
$pos = $pos->{cons}; # Second P
$pos = $pos->{cons}; # The L
$pos = $pos->{vowel}; # The E
#end loop
push @{$pos->{words}}, "apple";

[download]

This way you can find all words with a specific pattern of Vowel/Consonant extremely fast.

$dictionary->{vowel}{cons}{cons}{cons}{vowel}{words} will include apple, uncle, intro, extra, ochre and many more. $dictionary->{vowel}{words} would contain "I" and "a"

Alternatively, if you are planning to do only one search, you could build a regex string full of [aeiou]s and [^aeiou]s, then grep your dictionary.

In reply to Re^2: variables from STDIN by SuicideJunkie
in thread variables from STDIN by stigmatt

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.