Question

I have a small ruby application I wrote that’s an anagram searcher. It’s for learning ruby, but I would like to put it up online for personal use. I have some experience with Rails, and many here have recommended Sinatra. I’m fine with either, but I cannot find any information on how to use a text file instead of a database.

The application is quite simple, validates against a text file of a word list, then finds all anagrams. I have been assuming that this should be quite simple, but I’m stuck on importing that textfile into Rails (or Sinatra if i choose that way). In the Rails project, I have placed the textfile in the lib directory.

Unfortunately, even though the path appears to be correct in Rails, I get an error:

no such file to load -- /Users/court/Sites/cvtest/lib/english.txt  

(cvtest is the name of the rails project)

Here is the code. It works great by itself:

file_path = '/Users/court/Sites/anagram/dictionary/english.txt'  input_string = gets.chomp   # validate input to list if File.foreach(file_path) {|x| break x if x.chomp == input_string}    #break down the word   word = input_string.split(//).sort     # match word     anagrams = IO.readlines(file_path).partition{     |line| line.strip!     (line.size == word.size && line.split(//).sort == word)   }[0]     #list all words except the original     anagrams.each{ |matched_word| puts matched_word unless matched_word == input_string }    #display error if  else   puts 'This word cannot be found in the dictionary' end 

Answer 1

Factor the actual functionality (finding the anagrams) into a method. Call that method from your Web app.

In Rails, you’d create a controller action that calls that method instead of ActiveRecord. In Sinatra, you’d just create a route that calls the method. Here’s a Sinatra example:

get '/word/:input'   anagrams = find_anagrams(params[:input])   anagrams.join(', ') end 

Then, when you access the http://yourapp.com/word/pool, it will print ‘loop, polo’.