[Tutor] Generate word list from specified letters

[Peter Otten]

Scurvy Scott wrote:

> I'm trying to create a program right now that will pull a dictionary from
> urban dictionary, then use that dictionary as the basis for generating
> words with specified letters.
> 
> Maybe I'm not articulating that well enough..
> 
> I'm not at all sure where to start and any guidance would be helpful.
> 
> I'm running Debian and Python 2.7

I suggest that you start with one part. If you read the words from your 
local /usr/share/dict/words file you can concentrate on organising that data 
for an efficient lookup. Make it as simple as you can, e. g. implement an

is_matching_word(word, letters)

function and loop over the words file. You need to decide if you care about 
repetition -- is letter-count significant, i. e do

'appointing', 'pagination', and 'poignant'

count as equal?

Once you have a working baseline you can think about how to replace the slow 
loop with fast dict lookup. What should the dict keys look like? They must 
be hashable -- string, tuple or frozenset are promising contenders. What 
should the values be? You sure can come up with something for these.

Once you have this running to your satisfaction you can work out how to get 
hold of the words from Urban Dictionary. Do they provide a downloadable 
list, an API, or do you have to scrape their webpages? If it's the first you 
have a drop-in replacement for you local words file, for the other options 
you need to write some more code.