In my last entry, I described the concept behind the Word Jumble game. In this entry, I will describe initial steps in creating the game.
Firstly, I needed some dictionary of words. The Unix flavors have built-in dictionaries, and I develop on OSX, so I Googled the location of its dictionary:
1 | /usr/share/dict/words |
I knew I wanted to do puzzles of only 5-letter words, so I used the
1 | grep |
command to create a file of just these words.
1 | grep ^.....$ /usr/share/dict/words > dictionary-5letterwords.txt |
Notice the regular expression I used. I wanted to demonstrate an actual use of regular expressions for this project. The regular expression
1 | /^.....$/ |
says to match a line of just 5 characters. The period means to match any character. I made the assumption that there would be no words in the dictionary with a space or other punctuation–although that was, perhaps, a faulty assumption.
Next, I started working on the code. Since we use mostly ColdFusion at Wharton, that’s what I wrote the app in.
Word Jumble Filled