Alright, let me tell you about this little project I tackled: making a “letter soup” cheat. You know those games, right? Where they give you a bunch of jumbled letters, and you gotta find all the words you can make. I was playing one the other day and just got completely stuck. And I thought, there’s gotta be a better way than just staring at the screen or using some generic online thing that only has answers for their specific puzzles.
Figuring Out What I Needed
So, I decided I wanted to build my own. Not some pre-made list, because what good is that when the game throws new letters at you? I wanted something that could take any jumble of letters I threw at it and spit out the possibilities. My own personal word unscrambler, if you will.
First things first, I realized I needed two main ingredients for this recipe:
- The jumbled-up letters from the game. That’s the easy part, I just type ’em in.
- A big, comprehensive list of actual English words. Like a dictionary, but just the words themselves.
I went searching for a word list, and found a few plain text files online. Just simple lists, one word per line. I downloaded one that seemed pretty hefty – more words, more chances to find what I’m looking for, right?
The Logic Behind It
Okay, so I had my game letters and my giant word list. Now, how to make them talk to each other? I sat and thought about it. It’s not enough for a word from my list to just contain some of the game letters. It has to be made only from those letters, and crucially, you can’t use a letter more times than it appears in your jumble.
So, if my game letters were, say, ‘R’, ‘A’, ‘T’, ‘S’, and the word from my list is ‘TAR’, that’s a good one. ‘A’, ‘R’, ‘T’ are all there. But if the word is ‘STARS’, and I only have one ‘S’ in my jumble, then no dice. That word is out.
My plan was this: for every single word in my big dictionary file, I’d need to check it against the letters I had from the game. I figured I’d have to count the occurrences of each letter in the dictionary word, and then count the occurrences of each letter in my jumbled game letters.
Putting It All Together
I decided to try and whip up a little script to do the heavy lifting. Nothing super fancy, just something to process all that data. First, I got my script to read that big dictionary file, word by word.
Then came the core part. For each word from the dictionary, I did this check:
- I’d count how many times each letter (A, B, C, etc.) appeared in the current dictionary word.
- I’d also count how many times each letter appeared in the jumbled letters I typed in from the game.
- Then, for the dictionary word to be a valid match, two things had to be true for every letter of the alphabet:
- The count of that letter in the dictionary word couldn’t be more than its count in my jumbled game letters.
- If a letter was in the dictionary word, it obviously had to be present in my jumbled letters.
It’s like, if the dictionary word has two ‘P’s, I must have at least two ‘P’s in my jumble. If it has one ‘X’, I need at least one ‘X’. If the dictionary word has a ‘Z’ but my jumble doesn’t, then that word is immediately out.
If a dictionary word passed all these checks, I’d add it to a list of “found words.”
The Result: My Own Word Finder!
And you know what? It actually worked! I’d type in my mess of letters from the game, run my little process, and bam! Out would come a nice, clean list of all the possible words I could make. It was pretty satisfying to see it churn through everything and give me the answers.
It wasn’t always super fast, especially if the dictionary was huge and I gave it a lot of letters, but it did the job. No more feeling completely stumped. I could just feed the letters into my tool and see what it came up with. It felt good to have built something myself that actually helped me out, instead of just relying on some generic webpage.
So yeah, that was my little dive into making a letter soup helper. A bit of thinking, a bit of tinkering, and I ended up with something pretty useful for myself. Way better than just a static cheat sheet!
