Wordhelper takes a list of letters on the command line and generates a list of words you can spell. I built it to help me cheat at board games.

Revisiting

I was intensely dissatisfied with how slow my original wordhelper was, so I decided to make a new version using a somewhat faster and prettier approach. What I did was to use a data structure called a trie. It's pretty neat.

Trie Solution

This is implemented in wordhelper_trie.cpp

How it works is as follows:

1. I insert all of the words found in 'words.txt' into the trie
2. Put the set of letters into a multiset
3. Do a depth first search of the tree, noting when a node that is the end of the word is found. -At each recursive DFS call, remove the letter of the current node from the set, and call DFS on the set without the letter.

Original Solution

This is implemented in wordhelper.cpp

Disclaimer: This is terrible. It basically worked by:

1. inserting all of the letters into a vector of chars
2. generating a power set enumeration of that vector
3. generating all of the combinations of all the power sets, and then putting all of those combinations into a new vector of strings
4. check all of the strings that were permuted against the dictionary

Feedback

As usual, please roast my code! I love feedback, and I don't care if you're nice about it or not.