word list algorithm

i have been racking me brain trying to find an effective way of doing this...

given a word list (20,000+) and a list of characters (about 5-10), how can i find all the words in the word list that use those characters only once...

so, example:

character_list = mlfrau

it would find:

stay,flu,arm,far,ram,fur,farm,maul,mural,armful

as long as they exist in the word list.

thanks for any help!

*cough* bruter *cough* :PP probably not anyway

Have you looked into regular expressions?

yes, of course, but i do not know the depths of which you speak. any insight to my problem would be great. thx

try

<?php
$char = 'mlfrau';
$word_list = 'frr,print,mam,the';
$a = explode(',',$word_list);
foreach ($a as $word){
preg_match_all("/[$char]/", $word, $b);

if (count($b[0]) == count(array_unique($b[0])) and count($b[0]) > 0) echo $word,"\n";
}
?>

thx sasa,

this will set me in the right direction. this is great, but this returns just "print". i change the "==" to "!=" and it returns "frr" and "mam", which is cool, cause only those letters exist in $char. but, i wish not to find words that use the letters twice. so "frr" would not be found, but "fr" would, so would "ma" but not "mam".

guess, i have a regular expressions book next to me, maybe i should read that.

thx

condition

if (count($b[0]) == count(array_unique($b[0])) and count($b[0]) > 0)

means

1st part just unique characters

and

2nd part one or more character mach

just word 'print' mach both

if you want to mach word 'the' remove 2nd conditon (and count($b[0]) > 0)

what i mean is that the word 'frr' should not exist in 'mlfrau', cause the 'r' is used once already. i don't want to match the world 'the' cause none of those letters exist in 'mlfrau'. i want to match only words that have unique letters in 'mlfrau', if the following were real words in the master word list, i would like this result...

mlfrau

rau

ulm

far

mal

*edit

crap, i noticed in my first post, the word stay should not have been found. $%^&! hope that wasn't too confusing.

if $char is 'mlfrau' and in your word list is word 'mlfrX', is it good result or not?

that would not match.

this works like i want it, from what i have tested.

<?php 
$char = 'mlfrau';
$word_list = 'frr,print,mam,the,ra,fratzl,rai,far,maul,maal,mail,ram,ramm,farm,farrm';
$a = explode(',',$word_list);

foreach ($a as $word){
preg_match_all("/[$word]/", $char, $b);

$check_word = '';
foreach($b[0] as $x)
	$check_word .= $x;

if(strlen($check_word) == strlen($word))
	echo $word."\n";
}
?>

this will output:

ra far maul ram farm

Can't you run through all the words, inside the loop run through all the chars and check if they only occur once using substr_count()?

good point, but there in lies another problem. what if the char list is 'mlfrrau', instead of 'mlfrau'. there are two r's, so the word 'frr' should pass for a match now. as long as the correct amount of that characters exist in the char list

try

<?php 
$char = 'mlfraum';
$word_list = 'frr,print,mam,the,ra,fratzl,rai,far,maul,maal,mail,ram,ramm,farm,farrm';
$a = explode(',',$word_list);
$char = str_split($char);
sort($char);
$char ='/^'.implode('?',$char).'?$/';

foreach ($a as $word){
$word1 = str_split($word);
sort($word1);
$word1 =implode('',$word1);
if (preg_match($char, $word1)) echo $word;
}
?>

speed 10 000 words per sec

excellent! this looks like it works very well. sasa, thx alot!