crosswords helper program

[Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen]

gg wrote:
> I plan to write a program in Python in order to help me doing 
> crosswords, I was wondering if such a program already existed.
> 
> Basically it will get the number of letters of the word (5, 10, 12...) 
> then the letters known (B in second letter, E in 5th letter...) and then 
> search in a dictionary the words matching this criteria
> 
> Regards
> 
> Gerard

Pretty straightforward with a regular expression:

import re
words = ["BULLETIN", "BALLPARK", "BUSINESS"]
r = re.compile("^BU..N..S$", re.IGNORECASE)
for word in words:
     if r.match(word):
         print word

You would probably want to allow the user to input both some basic 
format for your program and convert it to a regular expression as well 
as input a full pattern, because then the user can have words that have 
a U or a E in the second letter, simply because he doesn't know which 
one is right yet.

-- 
Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen
http://usinglvkblog.blogspot.com/
mailto:lasse at vkarlsen.no
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