NAME

Lingua::Anagrams - pure Perl anagram finder

VERSION

version 0.002

SYNOPSIS

use Lingua::Anagrams;

open my $fh, '<', 'wordsEn.txt' or die "Aargh! $!";
my @words = <$fh>;
close $fh;

my $anagramizer = Lingua::Anagrams->new( \@words );  # NOT a good word list for this purpose

my $t1       = time;
my @anagrams = $anagramizer->anagrams('Find anagrams!');
my $t2       = time;

print join ' ', @$_ for @anagrams;
print "\n\n";
print scalar(@anagrams) , " anagrams\n"";
print 'it took ' , ( $t2 - $t1 ) , " seconds\n"";

Giving you

...
naif nm rag sad
naif nm raga sd
naif nm rd saga
naif ragman sd

20906 anagrams
it took 3 seconds

DESCRIPTION

Lingua::Anagrams constructs a trie out of a list of words you give it. It then uses this trie to find all the anagrams of a phrase you give to its anagrams method. A dynamic programming algorithm is used to accelerate at the cost of memory. See new for how one may modify this algorithm.

Be aware that the anagram algorithm has been golfed down pretty far to squeeze more speed out of it. It isn't the prettiest.

METHODS

CLASS->new( $word_list, %params )

Construct a new anagram engine from a word list. The parameters understood by the constructor are

limit

The character count limit used by the dynamic programming algorithm to throttle memory consumption somewhat. If you wish to find the anagrams of a very long phrase you may find the caching in the dynamic programming algorithm consumes too much memory. Set this limit lower to protect yourself from memory exhaustion (and slow things down).

The default limit is set by the global $LIMIT variable. It will be 20 unless you tinker with it.

clean

A code reference specifying how text is to be cleaned of extraneous characters and normalized. The default cleaning function is

sub _clean {
    $_[0] =~ s/\W+//g;
    $_[0] = lc $_[0];
}

Note that this function, like _clean, must modify its argument directly.

$self->anagrams( $phrase )

Returns a list of array references, each reference containing a list of words which together constitute an anagram of the phrase.

AUTHOR

David F. Houghton <dfhoughton@gmail.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2014 by David F. Houghton.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.