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Apprentice Joined: 11 Sep 2005 Posts: 124

I need to take a scrambled phrase, and determine if it is any part of a string list
scrambled phrases can be multiple words, and ocassionally have punctuation , but the number of letters between spaces (actual white space character) is never scrambled. Might be able to take each word seperately and compare off of that, but I have no clue)

»»-Quest-Taphath-> Figure out this word or phrase for a nice but random reward.
»»-Quest-Taphath-> -->toeanag dttziioen<--
»»-Quest-Taphath-> HINT: -->Musical Composer<--

»»-Quest-Taphath-> Everyone failed to Figure out this word or phrase for a nice but random reward.
»»-Quest-Taphath-> -->toeanag dttziioen<--
»»-Quest-Taphath-> HINT: -->Musical Composer<--
»»-Quest-Taphath-> ANSWER: -->Gaetano Donizetti<--

Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2005 1:43 pm

Your question isn't really clear. You ask if it's possible to compare a scramble phrase to a string list. The short answer is yes. You can split the phrase into a string list based on white like so

Apprentice Joined: 11 Sep 2005 Posts: 124

I've generated an acceptable Phrase List, so far, I'm looking for more help with the perl reg expression to figure out how to sort it like you suggest

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

Don't have zmud to hand, so can't offer any code, but perhaps an easier way than the brute force method would be to have a copy of the answers scrambled into alphabetical order...

So
'Gaetano Donizetti'

would be linked to
'aaegnotdeiinottz'

Then when you are given
'toeanag dttziioen'

you would also sort it alphabetically, then you could read the original value off...

So you'd want a function...

#show mystringlist.%reSort(toeanag dttziioen)

which would really look for mystringlist.aaegnotdeiinottz
which would equal 'Gaetano Donizetti'

you'd have to write a reSort function, but that'd be pretty trivial

I'm sure Vijilante could write the lot from memory ;)

Apprentice Joined: 20 Sep 2005 Posts: 135

Both are nice ideas. Since they both require a second list/db to check against, then without a limited Q&A list/db wouldn't the required resources be beyond our scope? For composers alone, searching through all historical composers could be too much. Gaetano Donizetti was born 1797! A limited list of "great" historical composers would be in the hundreds (e.g. List of great classical music composers). Although I found a decent list you could use, there's another limitation: knowing what lists you need, researching them, and building them. Sounds very time consuming.

Another option would be to create a script that would show all possible scrambles for the given letters. This would spit out 'n' scrambles for which you would manually have to select the correct unscrambled answer.

The spam could be overwhelming, though. "toeanag" has 7 letters (2 repeating), giving (7!/2!) = 2,520 combinations! And foreign names would be hard to decipher the correct spelling: toeanag -> gaetano, gataneo, tageano, etc...

But, I'm not a wizard or guru, so maybe someone else has a better mind for building something for you.

Either way, your trivia sounds like fun. Good luck!

Apprentice Joined: 11 Sep 2005 Posts: 124

I've got a word list, and I have a way of storing the mixup answers it gives. I'm just having problems getting the alphabetical sort to work, I don't even know how to go about it, my real problem is returning each character in the string seperately, how to compare it to the existing alphabetized string, and then determining where in the alphabetized string it should go.
Thanks for Any help writing this script.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

I don't have zMud atm, so this is untested, but something like