Dictionary

ruby-dictionary provides a simple dictionary that allows for checking existence of words and finding a subset of words given a prefix.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'ruby-dictionary'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install ruby-dictionary

A dictionary is created by passing an array of strings to the initializer.

dictionary = Dictionary.new(%w(a ab abs absolute absolutes absolutely
                               absolve be bee been bees bend bent best))

Alternatively, words can be read in from a file (raw or gzip compressed) as well.

dictionary = Dictionary.from_file('path/to/uncompressed.txt')
dictionary = Dictionary.from_file('path/to/compressed.txt.gz')

It is assumed that the file contains one word per line. However, a separator can be passed to the method as an optional second parameter if that's not the case.

dictionary = Dictionary.from_file('path/to/uncompressed.txt', ' ')
dictionary = Dictionary.from_file('path/to/compressed.txt.gz', ',')

Once a dictionary is loaded, the #exists? method can be used to determine if a word exists.

dictionary.exists?('bees')       # => true
dictionary.exists?('wasps')      # => false

The #starting_with method returns a sorted array of all words starting with the provided string.

dictionary.starting_with('bee')  # => ["bee", "been", "bees"]
dictionary.starting_with('foo')  # => []

The #prefixes method returns a sorted array of all the words appearing in the beginning of the provided string.

dictionary.prefixes('abstract')  # => ["a", "ab", "abs"]
dictionary.prefixes('bend')      # => ["be", "bend"]

By default, a new Dictionary is case-insensitive, meaning "bee", "Bee", and "BEE" are all considered to be the same, regardless of adding to the dictionary or searching within it.

However, you can choose to use case-sensitive dictionary by passing an optional true parameter to both the #new and #from_file methods.

dictionary = Dictionary.new(%w(Alpha Beta), true)
dictionary.exists?('Alpha')      # => true
dictionary.exists?('alpha')      # => false

dictionary = Dictionary.from_file('restaurants.txt', "\n", true)
dictionary.starting_with('Mc')   # => ["McDonald's"]
dictionary.starting_with('mc')   # => []

Additionally, you can determine whether a dictionary is case-sensitive via the #case_sensitive? method.

dictionary = Dictionary.new([])
dictionary.case_sensitive?       # => false

dictionary = Dictionary.new([], true)
dictionary.case_sensitive?       # => true

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request