Question

Write code in Python that does the following : An anagram is when the order of a word can be changed to create a new word (evil,
live, and vile for example). Using the dictionary provided, find all of the anagram groups.
Which words contain the most anagrams? How large is this group? Here is another example:
Alert, alter, and later have 3 in their group. Use the provided dict.txt as your word list,
solution must also finish in less than a minute.

* I know there is no dict.txt file to use here..

file = open("dict.txt", "r", encoding="utf8")

*looking for a way to sort through the file and group anograms together

*output the groups from largest to smallest (if there is only a single word in a group, no need to display)
file.close()

Answer 1

To solve this program, I am assuming the dict.txt file contains the words one in each line as specified in the question. A sample dict file screenshot is added here, on which I will be working here-

Here the anagram groups are-

1. [evil, live, vile]
2. [lump,plum]
3. [eat,tea]
4. [alter,later,alert]

The python code for opening this file and finding all the anagram groups is given below-

from collections import defaultdict

file = open("dict.txt", "r", encoding="utf8")

#Store the file contents in a list
words = []
for line in file.readlines():
    words.append(line.strip())

#Close the file
file.close()

#Create default dictionary of list type
d = defaultdict(list)

for word in words:
    d[str(sorted(word))].append(word)

#Extract the anagram groups
groups = d.values()

#Remove the group whose length is 1
groups = [group for group in groups if len(group)>1]

#Sort the groups according to their length from largest to smallest
groups = sorted(groups, key = len, reverse = True)

print(groups)

Explanation -

• First, we open the file dict.txt and store all the words in it in a list named as words.
• Then the file is closed.
• We create a defaultdict of type len. A defaultdict is used when we want to refer to a key that is already not present in the dictionary. If such a key is accessed, a new key gets created and value is added. Here, the key is a string value and values are lists.
• We traverse through the words and store them in the dictionary. This is an important step. The working is explained through an example. Consider the words - [ate,eat,tea] . Here, d[str(sorted(word))] becomes the key. So, in this case, always aet will become the key and its values will be the list [ate, eat, tea]. In this way, all the anagrams will be grouped together.
• Then we extract a list of lists by taking all the values of the dictionary.
• Next, we iterate over this list and remove all the lists whose length is 1, i.e. they are not anagrams with any other word.
• Then, we sort the group of words, through Python sorted function, where key=len, i.e. sorting takes place by the length of the list, and reverse=True means list is sorted from largest to smallest.

Code Screenshot - for indentation

OUTPUT -

Keep the dict.txt in the same folder as the Python program