A Concise Introduction to Programming in Python

Chapter 15

Files

Working with large blocks of text in a file opens up a whole new range of

possibilities for interesting programs. The following program solves Jumble

puzzles, which ask the solver to figure out an unknown word given a scrambled

set of its letters.

One of the difficulties in solving this problem is that long words have so many

different reorderings, called p ermutations. The strategy employed here is to

create a unique signature for each word, so that a word has the same signature

as all of its permutations. This program also finds anagrams, since typing in

an unscrambled word will find all of its anagrams.

Listing 15.1: Solve Jumble

1 # solvejumble.py ...