TF#I Friday #6 : In which I write no F# at all
I’ve been spending a little time recently writing a simple Windows Phone 7 app and I’ve been impressed with how easy it has been. I’ve been thinking of writing an anagram solver as an exercise in F# – and it might make for another simple phone app – so I thought I’d start with a few simple steps.
The first step is to try (part of) a potential solution – given a list of words, group the words by the constituent letters (so that, for instance, horse and shore would be grouped together.) That way, I won’t have to try every single combination of letters and compare against a list of words. My intention this week was to write a simple program in C# to do this. Here’s the method that does the work:
private Dictionary<string, List<string>> ProcessWordList(string[] words)
{
Dictionary<string, List<string>> result = new Dictionary<string, List<string>>();
foreach (string word in words)
{
IOrderedEnumerable<char> ordered = from char a in word.ToCharArray()
orderby a
select a;
string orderedString = new string(ordered.ToArray());
if (result.ContainsKey(orderedString))
{
result[orderedString].Add(word);
}
else
{
List<string> list = new List<string>();
list.Add(word);
result.Add(orderedString, list);
}
}
return result;
}
Next exercise is either to extend the program towards solving anagrams or to write the method above in F#.
