Perl Weekly Challenge #221 - Good Strings, Bad Strings

Hi everybody! Very limited time this week so just a brief blog post.

This week we're looking for any words in the list that can be created only using letters from a dictionary string. Then print the number of characters in the good words.

Here's the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use v5.24;

my %chars;
$chars{$_}++ for (split(//, shift));

my $total;

foreach (@ARGV) {
    my @currWordChars = split(//, $_);
    my %list = %chars;
    my $notFound;

    for my $char (@currWordChars) {
        if ($list{$char}) {
            $list{$char}--;
        } else {
            $notFound = 1;
            last;
        }
    }
    $total += ($notFound ? 0 : @currWordChars);
}
say $total;

So we try every single word against a hash of the dictionary letters, and if we're missing a letter we skip that word. We do this by making a copy of the dictionary hash and removing letters as we use them to create the word we're currently looking at.

A very simple solution and I started work on the second one but didn't have enough time available. Have a good week and I'll hopefully see you next week!