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in reply to Simple regex wordlist question

That's an anagram problem, which has a canonical answer. First absorb your dictionary in a hash:

my %words; { open my $fh, '<', '/path/to/dict.txt' or die $!; while <$fh> { chomp; my $key = join '', sort split ''; push @{$words{$key}}, $_; } }

That collects your data, now just rearrange your input word to make a key and print the associated words:

my $word = <>; # or however you get it chomp; $word = join '', sort split '', $word; print "@{$words{$word}}\n";
Alphabetizing and mushing together the characters of a word provides a key for anagrams..

If this is used a lot or the dictionary is big, you may want to keep the "hash" in a database.

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