Gumnos / wordsearch

A word-search solution finder

wordsearch

A word-search solution finder.

Usage

Usage: wordsearch [options] puzzle.txt

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d DICTIONARY, --dictionary=DICTIONARY
                        Specify an alternate dictionary (one word per line)

  Search options:
    --no-diagonals      Disallow diagonals
    --no-reverse, --no-backwards
                        Disallow reverse matches
    -l LENGTH, --min-length=LENGTH
                        Set the minimum length of interest (default=3)

A puzzle is a text-file with equal-length lines such as

$ cat puzzle.txt
jkqcxq
sleety
uybtjx
niarih
nphail
ycoldo

If looking for particular words, they can be provided as an alternate dictionary:

$ cat words_to_find.txt
cold
hail
rain
sleet
sunny

All words in both the dictionary and the puzzle are normalized to lowercase before searching.

The output consists of the word, the (row, column) location of the starting letter, and the direction to follow to find the rest of the word:

sleet at row 2, col 1 going east
sunny at row 2, col 1 going south
rain at row 4, col 4 going west
hail at row 5, col 3 going east
cold at row 6, col 2 going east

This should run in both versions 2 and 3 of Python and has no dependencies outside the standard library.

Options

By default it uses /usr/share/dict/words as the wordlist. This can be changed using the -d WORDLIST option.

By default it will look for words diagonally, including backwards. These can be disabled by using the --no-diagonals and --no-backwards options.

Additionally, words in the word-list shorter than 3 letters are ignored by default. The -l LENGTH option allows this to be changed. This is more useful when using a large dictionary rather than a list of words expected to be found in the puzzle.

Examples:

Typical usage of finding a word-list words_to_find.txt in a given puzzle puzzle.txt:

$ python wordsearch.py -d words_to_find.txt puzzle.txt

Find all words of length 2 or more from the system dictionary:

$ python wordsearch.py -l 2 puzzle.txt

Find only words that don't require going up or left

$ python wordsearch.py --no-backwards puzzle.txt

Find only words in words_to_find.txt that don't require going up or left, and don't include diagonals

$ python wordsearch.py --no-diagonals --no-backwards -d words_to_find.txt puzzle.txt