NYT Spelling Bee solver in Ruby

SPELLING_BEE.md

Spelling Bee

NYT Spelling Bee solver written in Ruby. It should work fine on any BSD/Linux/Unix system with Ruby installed.

Running the code

In a terminal:

git clone git@gist.github.com:3488d03f298cef55289bc899e79e18a3.git spelling_bee
cd spelling_bee
irb -r ./spelling_bee.rb

In the irb session:

game = SpellingBee.new(must_contain: 'h', may_contain: 'acilot')
game.pangrams # ["catholic"]
game.words    # ["achoo", "alcohol", "alcoholic", "aloha", "altho", ...]

Dictionary

If your operating system does not have a dictionary file located at '/usr/share/dict/words' this code will exit without producing a result. You can specify a custom dictionary file location by passing it in as a string:

# If your OS has a dictionary file located at: /opt/share/words
game = SpellingBee.new(dictionary: '/opt/share/words', must_contain: 'h', may_contain: 'acilot')

.gitignore

.vscode

spelling_bee.rb

class SpellingBee
  def initialize(dictionary: '/usr/share/dict/words', must_contain:, may_contain:)
    @dictionary = dictionary
    @must_contain = must_contain
    @may_contain = may_contain
  end

  def pangrams
    @pangrams ||= words.filter { |word| may_contain.chars.filter { |c| word.match(/#{c}/) }.count == may_contain.chars.count }
  end

  def words
    @words ||= dictionary_words
                 .filter { |word| /(?=.*#{must_contain})/.match(word) }
                 .reject { |word| /(?=.*[#{must_not_contain}])/.match(word) }
  end

  private

  attr_reader :dictionary, :may_contain, :must_contain

  def dictionary_words
    @dictionary_words = IO.readlines(dictionary, chomp: true).reject { |word| word.length < 4 }
   rescue Errno::ENOENT
    puts "Cannot find dictionary at: #{dictionary}"
    exit!
  end

  def must_not_contain
    ('\'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'.chars - may_contain.chars - [must_contain]).join
  end
end