Problem of the Day
A new programming or logic puzzle every Mon-Fri

Given a list of letters, return a valid dictionary word that can be made with those letters. As a much tougher bonus, return the longest possible dictionary word that you can make with those letters.

Comments:

• Nick Krichevsky - 10 years, 5 months ago

  Are we allowed to use each letter more than once? For example if the letters given are a and b, would the word 'ba' be the only valid response? Or would ['aa', 'aba', 'abba', 'ba', 'baa', 'baba'] all be valid responses?

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• Max Burstein - 10 years, 5 months ago

  Each letter only once. So with a and b you could just return a.

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• Nick Krichevsky - 10 years, 5 months ago

  Done.

  d = open('dictionary.txt','r')
  words = [line.rstrip() for line in d]
  d.close()
  letters = ['a','b']
  validWords = []
  for word in words:
      failed = False
      l = list(letters) # make a duplicate
      for letter in word:
          if letter in l:
              l.remove(letter)
          else:
              failed = True
              break
      if not failed:
          validWords.append(word)
  print validWords
  print "Longest word possible:", max(validWords)
  

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