Word Search

This is a Python implementation of the Word Search puzzle, but with a few modifications, namely:

• The grid doesn’t have a dimension limitation of 10 by 10.
• The word doesn’t have a length limitation of three characters.
• The word doesn’t have to contain only the alphabetic characters.
• There is no hidden word in the grid.

Table of contents

• Usage
  • REPL
  • File input
• Remarks

Usage

Clone this repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/zhaqenl/wordsearch/ ~/python/wordsearch

REPL

Run the following command in your terminal:

$ python
>>>

Once inside the interactive interpreter, type:

>>> import core
>>>

If you only want the quantity of matches of a word inside a grid, run:

>>> core.wordsearch('cat', """catt
... aata
... tatc""", '\n')
4
>>>

If you want a different character as a separator, change the separator inside the grid and the corresponding separator argument of the function (naturally, use a unique character for the separator):

>>> core.wordsearch('cat', 'catt aata tatc', ' ')
4
>>> core.wordsearch('cat', 'catt;aata;tatc', ';')
4
>>> core.wordsearch('cat', 'cattxaataxtatc', 'x')
4

However, if you want to display the coordinates, themselves, of the matches, run the find_matches function inside core:

>>> core.find_matches('cat', """catt
aata
tatc""", '\n')
[[(0, 0), (0, 1), (0, 2)], [(0, 0), (1, 0), (2, 0)], [(0, 0), (1, 1), (2, 2)], [(2, 3), (1, 3),
(0, 3)]]

File input

If you prefer a file as the input of the script, you could create a file whose first line indicates the amount of grid-to-word pairs, followed by the row quantity of the first pair, followed by its column quantity, then the string grid itself, and finally, the hidden word. See dummy_input.txt for an example structure.

After creating the .txt file, run the following:

$ python wordsearch.py dummy_input.txt
Case 1: 4
Case 2: 1
Case 3: 4

If you’re interested in measuring the script’s speed, append time at the start of the previous command:

$ time python wordsearch.py dummy_input.txt

If you want a little more speed, use Pypy, an alternative implementation of the Python language:

$ pypy wordsearch.py dummy_input.txt
Case 1: 4
Case 2: 1
Case 3: 4

Remarks

To learn how I came up with the solution to this project’s problem, proceed to my article!