In today’s Programming Praxis exercise, our goal is to reduce a word one letter at a time, where each step must be a new valid word. Let’s get started, shall we?
Some imports:
import Data.Char import Data.List
First we need a function to determine all the valid words that are one letter shorter.
chop :: Eq a => [[a]] -> [a] -> [[a]] chop dict xs = filter (`elem` dict) $ zipWith (++) (inits xs) (tail $ tails xs)
Next, we apply this function recursively as long as the remaining word consists of two or more letters. We keep a list of the steps we took.
chain :: Eq a => [[a]] -> [a] -> [[[a]]] chain dict xs@(_:_:_) = map (xs :) . chain dict =<< chop dict xs chain _ xs = [[xs]]
To test if everything is working properly, we load a dictionary (making sure to convert it to lowercase) and print the results for the word “planet”.
main :: IO () main = do dict <- fmap (lines . map toLower) $ readFile "74550com.mon" mapM_ print $ chain dict "planet"
We get 44 results instead of the 40 Phil got, which seems to be due to the presence of the word “ne” in my word list.
Tags: bonsai, chop, chopping, code, dictionary, Haskell, kata, praxis, programming, words
