Question

I have written an anagram solving algorithm, which does not work.

for word in wordlist: #Checking for equal length
    if sorted(word.replace("\n", "")) == sorted(anagram):
        possible.append(word)

I needed to use len(word) – 1 to take away the \n.

Answer 1

(1) I don’t understand the “-1” in “len(word)-1” in your first loop.

(2) Your second loop has several problems:

It doesn’t check to see whether the letters are the same, it checks to see whether each letter in the anagram is in the word. You’re not using the count information, so you can’t distinguish between bok and book. You’re also removing from a sequence you’re iterating over, which leads to unexpected behaviours.

For my part I’d simply use

sorted_anagram = sorted(anagram)
possibles = [word for word in wordlist if sorted(word) == sorted_anagram]

rather than explicit for loops.

Note that sorting the words is a kind of canonicalization process — it makes sure that any two words which are anagrams of each other will be in the same format. Another approach to determine whether two things are anagrams would be to make sure that the letter counts are the same:

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> Counter('book')
Counter({'o': 2, 'k': 1, 'b': 1})
>>> Counter('obko')
Counter({'o': 2, 'k': 1, 'b': 1})
>>> Counter('bok')
Counter({'k': 1, 'b': 1, 'o': 1})
>>> 
>>> Counter('book') == Counter('boko')
True
>>> Counter('book') == Counter('bok')
False