Do you like word puzzles? A program you might find useful...

[TerranRich]

I made it in about 10 minutes (with additions over the past few days). I call it Word Puzzle Assistant and it's in version 1.5 right now.

Download Version 1.5 Here!

Try it out! It's a neat little program that helps you solve crosswords, jumbles, and any other special word puzzles with certan requirements. You give it a word or a pattern and it spits out all the matches. For example, if you give it "HERTE" and choose to Descramble, it will return "ETHER", "THERE", and "THREE" as matches.

For words where a few letters are missing, you type it in as a pattern, i.e., the missing letters are represented by, in this case, hyphens ("-"). So, if you need an 8-letter word whose 1st letter is F, 4th letter is H, and 5th letter is E, just type in "F--HE---", click "Fill Pattern", and you'd get a whole list of matches, such as "FATHEADS" and "FATHERLY".

If you need to, you can also specify that certain letters MUST be included in all matches, or must NOT be included in all matches. Like if you need that 8-letter word above to include the letters "L" and "Y", but exclude the letters "Q" and "J", you would type in "LY" into the Include box, and "QJ" into the Exclude box and hit the "Fill Pattern" button.

New in Version 1.5:
• You can now specify (when using "Fill Pattern") that no words should have repeating letters. It also checks if the pattern you gave has repeating letters and, if you specified to prevent repeated letters, it tells you that you're dumb and should change one of the two.
• I've found a use for the blank yellow button! You can now put in a word and find all words (anagrammed or not) within that word. So "ANAGRAM" would return words like "GRAM", "NAG", and "MAN".

Don't worry, though, because it comes with a descriptive ReadMe PDF file.

Here's a screenshot below:


I know it's a bit colorful, but that's my style and it stands out from other generic program looks. If you don't like it, I can see what I can do. Let me know if this would be useful for anybody!

[SpacePirateCaine]

Looks like it'd be a useful little tool for many things. I thought that just for a lark, I'd test it out as a method of creating anagrams using the descrambler, and found that every time I use the descrambler, the program commits suicide with an 'run-time error 76, path not found' message.

Seems like it'll be fun, but at the moment, my computer and it don't seem to really agree.

For the sake of compatibility problem solving, my computer is a Dell inspiron 3800, WinXP, P3 700mhz.

[TerranRich]

Sorry, it was pointing to a directory that only existed on my hard drive, but I fixed it and re-uploaded it. Download it again, please.

Sorry about that, I thought I caught it before anybody downloaded it.

[Privateer Puddin']

wouldn't the point of word puzzles be working them out?

[TerranRich]

Yes, but this can ALSO be used to create your own puzzles, too.

If you wanted to create an anagram puzzle (much like what SpacePirateCaine wanted to do), you could use WPA for that. You can create crossword puzzles (say you need a word that requires certain letters in certain places, but can't quite think of it). There are millions of uses!

[SpacePirateCaine]

I agree with Puddin' about the whole 'the challenge is the whole point of doing puzzles in the first place' thing, but it has other uses, such as doing the opposite - using it to create word puzzles yourself. Or, as I was attempting, making anagrams for fun. It's a neat concept, I'd say.

(Rich beat me to it).

[Kinoko]

I think it could be useful just for figuring out puzzles that are driving you insane. You always want to TRY to figure something out but it doesn't always work. In these cases, I'd rather get the answer rather than be stuck with that puzzle for all of eternity. There are all SORTS of great impractical uses for this thing too.

Imagine you're solving a crime involving a smudged out letter and you need to figure out what the original word was in order to solve the crime!

[TerranRich]

I just updated it to Version 1.5. Additions: "Find Within" button and "No repeating letters" option. Read the first post for more information and a new screenshot!

[Moox]

Great proggie Rich! Its amazingly complex for being so simple

[TerranRich]

And all it uses are boolean operators and word-list files and string manipulation (checking).

If anyone is interested, I can release the source in Visual Basic 6.0 and people can see how it's done. Or I could make a tutorial.

[Moox]

I found a bug, If you use uppercase and lowercase it gives you an error and shuts off.

Also, for future versions you could incorperate a dictionary so that the words inside a word are actual words.

[TerranRich]

What do you mean incorporate a dictionary? Those are supposedly real words, taken from a word list used for playing scrabble that I discovered online.

[Losttraveler unlog]

O, I have an awful vocabulary havent even seen some of those, but it doesnt matter, damn those american schools!

Anyways, even all lowercase crashes it

[TerranRich]

Yeah I gotta fix that. I forget to convert the entry to uppercase and use that. That's all I need to do. Will do and update soon!