{"id":6104,"date":"2023-11-18T00:01:58","date_gmt":"2023-11-18T08:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/?p=6104"},"modified":"2023-11-25T08:52:53","modified_gmt":"2023-11-25T16:52:53","slug":"hunting-for-7-character-pangrams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/?p=6104","title":{"rendered":"Hunting for 7-Character Pangrams"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a fan of the online game Spelling Bee<\/a>. In this game, you use a combination of seven letters to spell various words. Each word is at least four-letters long and must contain a special letter, shown in the center of Figure 1. When you create a word that contains all seven letters, you’ve discovered a pangram<\/em>.
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Figure 1. Seven tiles from the Spelling Bee game. One of the pangrams is WARPING, which uses all seven letters.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

The Spelling Bee puzzle shown in Figure 1 has 34 correct answers. Each one contains at least four of the shown letters and all include the W, the center tile. It’s a fun game that inspires me to wonder how many words in English are pangrams?<\/p>\n

According to the Spelling Bee rules, the answers cannot be proper nouns. They can occasionally be foreign words, though this rule seems inconsistent. Regardless, I’m inspired. I cobbled together code from last week’s Lesson<\/a> to look for 7-letter words. Then I added an update to this month’s Exercise solution<\/a> to look for unique characters in 7-letter words. Here is the result:<\/p>\n

2023_11_18-Lesson.c<\/a><\/h3>\n
\r\n#include <stdio.h>\r\n#include <stdlib.h>\r\n#include <string.h>\r\n\r\n\/* this code assumes the following path is valid *\/<\/span>\r\n#define DICTIONARY \"\/usr\/share\/dict\/words\"\r\n#define SIZE 32\r\n#define LENGTH 7\r\n#define TRUE 1\r\n#define FALSE 0\r\n\r\nint char_scan(char *a)\r\n{\r\n    int size,x,y;\r\n\r\n    \/* obtain size *\/<\/span>\r\n    size = strlen(a) + 1;\r\n    \/* scan the characters *\/<\/span>\r\n    for( x=0; x<size-2; x++ )\r\n    {\r\n        for( y=x+1; y<size-1; y++ )\r\n        {\r\n            if( a[x] == a[y] )\r\n            {\r\n                \/* not unique *\/<\/span>\r\n                return(FALSE);\r\n            }\r\n        }\r\n    }\r\n    return(TRUE);\r\n}\r\n\r\nint main()\r\n{\r\n    FILE *dict;\r\n    int unique;\r\n    char word[SIZE],*r;\r\n\r\n    \/* open the dictionary *\/<\/span>\r\n    dict = fopen(DICTIONARY,\"r\");\r\n    if( dict==NULL )\r\n    {\r\n        fprintf(stderr,\"Unable to open %s\\n\",DICTIONARY);\r\n        exit(1);\r\n    }\r\n\r\n    \/* scan for LENGTH-letter words *\/<\/span>\r\n    unique = 0;\r\n    while( !feof(dict) )\r\n    {\r\n        memset(word,'\\0',SIZE);        \/* clear buffer *\/<\/span>\r\n        r = fgets(word,SIZE,dict);    \/* read a word *\/<\/span>\r\n        if( r==NULL )\r\n            break;\r\n        if( word[LENGTH-2]=='\\'' )            \/* skip possessives *\/<\/span>\r\n            continue;\r\n        if( word[LENGTH]=='\\n' )            \/* 7-letter word *\/<\/span>\r\n        {\r\n            if( char_scan(word) )\r\n            {\r\n                printf(\"%s\",word);\r\n                unique++;\r\n            }\r\n        }\r\n    }\r\n    printf(\"I found %d pangrams!\\n\",unique);\r\n\r\n    \/* close *\/<\/span>\r\n    fclose(dict);\r\n\r\n    return(0);\r\n}<\/pre>\n
The char_scan()<\/em> function is an update to digit_scan()<\/em> from this month’s Exercise solution. The snprintf()<\/em> function isn’t required as a string (a<\/code>) is passed directly. I retained the size<\/code> variable, though all strings should be 7-characters long. Otherwise, the function works the same as from this month’s Exercise solution.<\/p>\n
The main()<\/em> function scans for LENGTH<\/code> size words, where LENGTH<\/code> is 7 characters. For words of that size, the char_scan()<\/em> function is called and, when TRUE, the pangram word is output and a tally kept.<\/p>\n
When I ran the program without checking for pangrams, it reported 11,945 7-letter words in the dictionary file. After adding the char_scan()<\/em> function, the output showed 4,078 pangrams.<\/p>\n
The program isn’t perfect. For example, it flags the word vicu\u00f1a<\/em> as being 7-letters long. It’s probably interpreting the \u00f1 as two-letters. Further, the Spelling Bee game tries to avoid plurals, where my program makes no such attempt.<\/p>\n
All Spelling Bee puzzles have at least one pangram solution. Sometimes the pangrams can be quite long. For next week’s Lesson<\/a>, I scan the digital dictionary to look for all possible pangram words seven letters or longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A program can not only find dictionary words of a certain length, but words that contain no repeating letters. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6104"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6137,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6104\/revisions\/6137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}