Solving Word Cookies Puzzles: A Python Adventure

Playing games are a way to relax the brain from the stress of the day, or maybe to just take breaks from work. Sometimes however, games can be a stress on their own, and so I think is the case of 'Word Cookies,' a fun puzzle game where you are given a set of scrambled letters and tasked to solve for the words contained in it.

As I progressed in the game, it kept getting difficult to solve with little to no resources to help out, I got stuck several times. But wait a minute, I code in Python, so why can't I figure a way out? Here is where Python language comes to shine.

Now how do I use Python to solve the scrambled betters. I needed a way to check words in the scrambled letters and I broke the implementation down into simple steps.

Plan:

1. Get a dictionary of words to check in the scrambled letters.
2. Create a csv containing only n-letter words, in this case I created a csv containing 3-letter-words to 7-letter-words
3. Check to see if a word from the csv has all its letters contained in the scrambled letters
4. Save it to a list of its own number of words, e.g, if a word is 'age', then it will be saved to a list of 3-letter words, and so on.
5. Display the result

Let's get to work:

First of all I searched online and found a dictionary which I could download in csv format and divided it into separate CSV files containing each letter. Here's what it looks like:

Next, I got a python code to check through the CSVs from A-Z and pick out the 3-letter-words, and omit words with spaces and other unusable format. This was done at the same time to 4, 5, 6, and 7 -letter words.

Here's what it looks like:

import os
import csv
import re
import pandas as pd

# Define folder paths
input_folder = 'C:\\Users\\Zenbook\\Desktop\\Word lists in csv'
output_folder = 'C:\\Users\\Zenbook\\Desktop\\Word list output'


# Function to find words of specific lengths in text
def find_words_of_length(text, length):
    words = re.findall(r'\b\w+\b', text)
    return [word for word in words if len(word) == length]


# Initialize dictionaries to store words of each length
words_by_length = {3: set(), 4: set(), 5: set(), 6: set(), 7: set()}

# Loop through all CSV files in the input folder
for filename in os.listdir(input_folder):
    if filename.endswith('.csv'):
        filepath = os.path.join(input_folder, filename)

        # Read each CSV file with a fallback encoding
        with open(filepath, 'r', encoding='ISO-8859-1') as file:
            reader = csv.reader(file)
            for row in reader:
                # Loop through each cell in the row
                for cell in row:
                    for length in words_by_length.keys():
                        words = find_words_of_length(cell, length)
                        words_by_length[length].update(words)

# Save words of each length to separate CSV files
for length, words in words_by_length.items():
    output_file = os.path.join(output_folder, f'{length}_letters.csv')
    with open(output_file, 'w', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as file:
        writer = csv.writer(file)
        for word in sorted(words):  # Sort words for neatness
            writer.writerow([word])

print("Words have been saved to separate CSV files based on their length.")

Here is the result in the output folder I specified:

Now with this output folder, I just have to check the words in it to see if they are contained in the scrambled letters. Here is the code that does that:

import csv

# Define the string to check against
check_string = 'langaur'

# Define the folder path for CSV files
input_folder = 'C:\\Users\\Zenbook\\Desktop\\Word list output'


# Function to check if all letters in word can be found in check_string
def is_word_in_string(word, check_string):
    # Check if each letter in the word is in the string
    for letter in word:
        if word.count(letter) > check_string.count(letter):
            return False
    return True


# Check words for 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7-letter CSVs
for length in [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]:
    input_file = f'{input_folder}/{length}_letters.csv'
    print(f"\nLength {length}:")

    with open(input_file, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as file:
        reader = csv.reader(file)
        found_words = []

        for row in reader:
            word = row[0].strip()  # Remove any extra whitespace
            if is_word_in_string(word, check_string):
                found_words.append(word)

        # Print all found words for the given length
        for i in found_words:
            print(i)

A Quick Breakdown:

We take the output folder from the previous code and use it as the input folder in the actual solution code above. The beauty of this solution is in the simplicity of the function 'is_word_in_string'. We don't have to check is the individual letters are contained in the scrambled words, because it will be extra logic written for letters that appear more than once.

We only have to check if for each letter in a dictionary word, it appears less than or equal to the amount of times it does in the scrambled words, and boom, we can confirm if each letter of the dictionary word actually exists in the scrambled letter.

Let's see the code in action:

Hurray! And now I have a way to move ahead when I get stuck. Its not just about cheating the system always, there is no fun in that, but when I really need it, this solver comes in handy. I can also get as many extra words as possible so that I can fill up that jar and get some awesome resources.

And there it is. Python is a versatile language to automate the quick stuff. You can use it simply in your day to day activities such as this, or for complex work task and even far more advanced work such as Machine Learning. Find a python project to work on today. Cheers.

Hey my name if Ifedolapo, I'm a frontend developer and python programmer (I also design by the way). You can get to know more about me from Portfolio website

Thanks for going through this post.