checking words in a dictionary [closed]

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开发者_高级运维

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I need to determine if an unknown 5 or 6 letter string is a valid word, i.e. is in the dictionary. I could submit the string/word to an online dictionary, but I need to check this string/word, which will be different each time, for about 100 to 150 times. This seems to be a bit time consuming.

My next thought would be to try to get a dictionary program of my own. It would need to be in Java as my program is written in Java. Does the Java API already have a class for doing this? Can I get a descent one that someone has already coded, and all I have to do is submit the string/word to it?

My program is not being used for spell checking. I want to write a program for unscrambling the Jumbled Word Puzzles when I get stuck on a scrambled word. Thanks for your suggestions.

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You could use one of the open source dictionaries and load it into a database: ftp://ftp.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/dict/ and ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/

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For scrambled words, you might want to look at the Jumble algorithm, an implementation of which is seen here.

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If you don't need spell checking this would be really easy. Just load all your words into a HashSet and then check to see if that set contains the word you want to test. There are tons of word lists available.

If you do need a spell checker, then check out aspell or other free APIs.

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aspell and its associated word lists and dictionaries might be the answer.

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I think aspell has a Java version.

edit: actually it looks like you might do better with this aspell spinoff called Jazzy.

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Maybe you can check some wordlist: http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/

This page has some word lists in text format, so you can process in Java yourself, most easily using a HashSet. You need to use more efficient data structures if efficiency is important.

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Maybe you could try Peter Norvig's spelling checker. I think it's an elegant way to get 80-90% accuracy.