[Melbourne-pm] Looking for suggestions

[Brendon Oliver]

> there's a very valuable lesson about perl here: there will almost always
> be a perl module in CPAN to do exactly what you need....and it will do
> it properly, rather than implementing your own quick-and-dirty partial
> solution.

.. and speaking of which, I was poking around cpan a bit over the weekend 
looking for a module to help me but no luck, so I'm hoping someone might have 
a suggestion or two before I go off and write something of my own:

What I'm after is something to help solve word puzzles like Scrabble, Boggle, 
crosswords, etc.  What I'm thinking of is something that I can feed, 
say /usr/share/dict/*, then give it a string (or list) of random letters and 
a maximum word length.  Said module would then process possible permutations 
of the letters and return a list of valid "words" from the dictionary, 
containing only those letters and no longer than the max word length.  
Ability to accept a meta-character (eg. * or ?) to indicate a wildcard letter 
(matches anything) would be a bonus.  ie. given say ouxz*se and max length 5, 
would give house, mouse, rouse, etc. as possible words.


Thoughts anyone?

cheers,

- b.



-- 
I'd just as soon kiss a Wookie.
		-- Princess Leia Organa

 08:40:09 up 7 days,  2:11,  8 users,  load average: 0.18, 1.10, 1.57