Question

So, here’s the preface:

I’m quite a beginner in Ruby. I’m working on a anagram finding script (find all anagrams in a text file). The essence is: I create a dictionary where key is word code and value is an array with words that refer to this code. It is like that: {"abdeis"=>["abides", "biased"] ,"achr"=>["char"], ... }. In the end I just print out the values with length of >1. So good so far.

Here’s the deal: I want to modify the output, so that such cases are omitted: ["Wood", "wood", "WooD"] – all are different in case only. But such cases should stay: ["Doom", "DooM", "mood"].

My current piece of code:

def print_anagram(anagram_dict)
  anagram_list = anagram_dict.values
  anagram_list.each { |i|
    if i.length > 1
      print i.join("\t")
      print "\n"
    else
      next
    end
   }
end

anagram_dict is a dictionary mentioned above.

What checks should I make to throw these cases away? The things I think of seem way to bulky to me. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

def print_anagram(anagram_dict)
  anagram_list = anagram_dict.values
  anagram_list.each do |i|
    next if i.map(&:downcase).uniq.length == 1

    if i.length > 1
      print i.join("\t")
      print "\n"
    else
      next
    end
  end
end

What this does:

• make all Strings lowercase

• get only unique elements from the array

• if you only have one unique element, all elements are the same

map(&:downcase) is a shorter way of doing: map { |element| element.downcase }