Swappy

Fast, customizable, Elixir-based anagram generator.

(But https://crates.io/crates/swappy is faster.)

Trying It Out

Assuming you have Elixir installed, you can clone this repo, mix deps.get and mix help generate_anagrams.

Installing As a Project Dependency

Swappy is available via Hex. To use it in a project:

Add Swappy to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [{:swappy, "~> 0.0.1"}]
end

Ensure Swappy is started before your application:

def application do
  [applications: [:swappy]]
end

Basic Module Usage

defmodule MyAnagramGenerator do
  use Swappy
end

anagrams = MyAnagramGenerator.anagrams_of("batman") # uses a default wordlist
# or
anagrams = MyAnagramGenerator.anagrams_of("batman", %{wordlist: ["bat", "tab", "man", "cat"]})

The wordlist is a list of words you consider valid. This is fine for playing around in the console, but since your wordlist requires some processing before Swappy can use it to generate anagrams, you'll get better performance if you let Swappy do that at compilation time.

You can limit the number of results generated like:

anagrams = MyAnagramGenerator.anagrams_of(some_string, %{limit: 10})

Compiling Custom Wordlists

If you want your module to use one or more custom word lists, set @wordlists in your module to be a map of wordlists before calling use Swappy.

The keys of your map will be the names of the wordlists, and the values can be lists, filenames, or a mixture of both. For example:

You can do that as follows:

defmodule SwappyUser do
  @wordlists %{
    tiny: ["pares", "parse", "pears", "reaps", "spare", "spear"],
    tiny_spanish: ["mañana", "maña", "na", "mana", "ña"],
    foody: "test/foody_wordlist.txt"
  }

  use Swappy
end

You can pass the name of the wordlist to use when generating anagrams: SwappyUser.anagrams_of("pares", %{wordlist: :tiny}). If no wordlist name is given, :default is assumed. If your map includes a :default, it will take the place of the one included with Swappy.

If you use a limit, the words at the start of your wordlist will be more likely to show up than the words at the end (though this isn't perfect yet).

Legal Characters

You can also customize which characters Swappy considers "legal" for the purposes of comparison. "Illegal" characters are not considered when deciding how things can be rearranged, but can still show up in your anagrams.

For instance, the default list of legal characters is just a through z, which does not include apostrophes. Therefore, Swappy would consider that "i'm" could be rearranged to spell "mi", or vice versa. If ' were a legal character, you couldn't find anagrams of "I'm cool" unless the result also contained one apostrophe.

You can customize the list of legal characters by setting @legal_chars in your module to be a charlist before you use Swappy. For instance:

defmodule SwappyUser do
  @legal_chars 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz' ++ 'áéíóúüñ'

  use Swappy
end

About the Wordlist

If you want anagrams that include sports-related words, computer slang, or whatever appeals to you, you'll need to use a custom wordlist.

The wordlist you use has a huge effect on the number and quality of your anagrams, as well as the time it takes to generate them.

Some possible starting wordlists can be found at http://norvig.com/ngrams/.

However, you probably want to clean up whatever you use. In particular, every short word you supply vastly increases the number of anagrams generated. You want as few 1-letter and 2-letter words as you can have.

Some wordlists include things 'r' as a word, on the grounds that you can say "The word 'rake' starts with 'r'." However, having every individual letter considered a "word" makes the number of possible anagrams astronomical.

See mix help clean_up_english_dictionary for an opinionated filter, then make your own if you wish.

How This Works

(TODO - flesh out)

• Take the input phrase and the dictionary
• Go through each word in the dictionary and ask, "can I spell this word using what's in this phrase?" Eg, "hat" can't be spelled using "my cat" because there's no "h". "matt" can't either because there's only one "t".
• ...
• Find combinations of alphagrams that we can spell using the phrase. Eg, "hitstab" can be used to build the alphagram combo "hist abt" (like "hits tab") or "hit abst" ( "like "hit stab"). For each of those, we can expand each alphagram - eg, "abst" can spell the dictionary word "bats" or "tabs" or "stab", so "hit abst" can be expanded to "hit bats" and "hit tabs" and "hit stab".

Development

Whatever else you do, check mix performance to ensure that anagram generation speed does not degrade.