Faster way to do this?

[Freddie]

Hi.

I was quite bored today, so I hacked up a quick Python script to do.. well, 
I'm not sure what it's called. You're given a set of letters ('olhel', for 
example), and you're supposed to come up with a bunch of words that use only 
those letters. In this case, it might be ('he', 'hell', 'hello', 'hoe', 
'hole', 'oh'). Just wondering if there's any way to make it faster, perhaps 
using a bizarre list comprehension :)

Output on my K6/2 450 running Debian Linux, roughly average after 3 tries:

python2.1 wordfinder.py hello
Read 45392 words in 0.94s
Method 1: found 6 words in 4.49s

python2.2 wordfinder.py hello
Read 45392 words in 1.00s
Method 1: found 6 words in 3.71s

Freddie


BEGIN CODE
----------
import sys
import time

WORD_FILE = '/usr/share/dict/american-english'

def main():
	if len(sys.argv) != 2:
		print 'USAGE: wordfinder.py <letters>'
		sys.exit(-1)
	
	# Split the word into chars?
	chars = [char for char in sys.argv[1].lower()]
	
	# Read in the word file
	start = time.time()
	words = []
	wf = open(WORD_FILE, 'ra')
	for line in wf.xreadlines():
		if line.endswith('\n'):
			line = line[:-1]
		words.append(line)
	print 'Read %d words in %.2fs' % (len(words), time.time() - start)
	
	# Try first method!
	start = time.time()
	found = method1(chars, words)
	print 'Method 1: found %d words in %.2fs' % (found, time.time() - start)

def method1(chars, words):
	found = 0
	for word in words:
		letters = [char for char in word]
		for char in chars:
			if char in letters:
				letters.remove(char)
				if not letters:
					break
		if not letters:
			found += 1
	return found

if __name__ == '__main__':
	main()

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Remove the oinks to see the light