“Cheating” at Words With Friends

It’s time to admin something. I cheat at Words With Friends. I only justify it with the fact that I at least wrote the code to help me cheat.

And cheat really isn’t the word for it. Sometimes I just stare at my letter rack for hours and come up with nothing. I wrote the following script just to get my brain going. You have two options with this script. Argument 1 always has to be your letter rack. You can use the “+” sign for the blank tile. Argument 2 is regular expression if you are looking for something specific.

If you have the tile rack aabbccd, you would run words-help aabbccd and get a dump of every combination. If you are looking for words with ba at the beginning of the word, you would run words-help aabbccd ^ba.

This script should work on anything UNIX-like that has a dictionary file at /usr/share/dict/words. You can edit the script as you need.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

WORDS_FILE = '/usr/share/dict/words'

class Engine

  def initialize(file)
    @file = file

    read_dictionary
  end

  def go(letters, regex = nil) 
    @letters = letters.split ''
    @regex = Regexp.new(regex) unless regex.nil?
    @words = []

    # Find the words
    letter_combinations do |letter_combination|
      letter_combination.permutation.to_a.each do |letter_array|
        word = letter_array.join('')
        if @dictionary.key?(word)
          if @regex.nil?
            @words << word
          else
            @words << word if @regex.match(word)
          end
        end
      end
    end

    # Clean up
    @words.sort.uniq
  end

  private

  def letter_combinations
    max = (2 ** @letters.count) - 1
    1.upto(max) do |i|
      word = []
      mask = sprintf("%0#{@letters.count}b", i).split('')
      mask.each_with_index do |bit, i|
        word << @letters[i] if bit == '1'
      end

      # Substitute wild cards
      idx = word.index '+'
      if idx.nil?
        yield word
      else
        ('a'..'z').each do |l|
          word[idx] = l
          yield word
        end
      end
    end
  end

  def read_dictionary
    # Build the dictionary
    @dictionary = {}

    # Read the words
    File.open(@file, 'r') do |file|
      file.each_line do |line|
        line.strip!

        # Skip proper nouns
        next if line =~ /[A-Z]/

        # Skip 1 letter words
        next if line.length == 1

        # Add the word to the dictionary
        @dictionary[line] = 1
      end
    end
  end

end

if ARGV.length < 1 || ARGV.length > 2
  $stderr.puts "Letters are required"
  exit
end

e = Engine.new WORDS_FILE
e.go(ARGV[0], ARGV[1]).each { |word| puts word }

This script is brute force, so the more letters you set as Argument 1, the longer it will take to run. You’ve been warned.

"Cheating" at Words With Friends