Now that the answers have been posted for the first 2 events, I thought I would share my answer for the first event.

My first version worked but on some queries would take up to 20 plus minutes to crunch to through the 32,000 + words.

Here is what I finally ended up with:

   1: $wordlistlocation = "c:\scripts\wordlist.txt"

   2: $phonenumber = Read-Host "Please Enter a phone number"

   3: $numbers = [char[]]$phonenumber.ToString()

   4:  

   5: filter Get-Letters {

   6:  

   7:     switch ($_) {

   8:         2 {$letters = "ABC"}

   9:         3 {$letters = "DEF"}

  10:         4 {$letters = "GHI"}

  11:         5 {$letters = "JKL"}

  12:         6 {$letters = "MNO"}

  13:         7 {$letters = "PRS"}

  14:         8 {$letters = "TUV"}

  15:         9 {$letters = "WXY"} 

  16:     } # Switch

  17:  

  18:     return $letters

  19:  

  20: } #Get-Letters

  21:  

  22: $first,$second,$third,$fourth,$fifth,$sixth,$seventh = $numbers | Get-Letters

  23:  

  24: $string1 = $first[0]     + $first[1]     + $first[2]

  25: $string2 = $second[0]     + $second[1]     + $second[2]

  26: $string3 = $third[0]     + $third[1]     + $third[2]

  27: $string4 = $fourth[0]    + $fourth[1]    + $fourth[2]

  28: $string5 = $fifth[0]    + $fifth[1]        + $fifth[2]

  29: $string6 = $sixth[0]    + $sixth[1]        + $sixth[2]

  30: $string7 = $seventh[0]    + $seventh[1]    + $seventh[2]

  31:  

  32: $pattern = "^[" + $string1 + "][" + $string2 + "][" + $string3 + "][" + $string4 +"][" + $string5 + "][" + $string6 + "][" + $string7 + "]"

  33:  

  34: Get-Content $wordlistlocation | Select-String -Pattern $pattern | Select -first 1

First I get the content of the wordlist file and then read in a phone number. The cast to an array of char[] was necessary to put them into an array as individual elements. It was interesting that I could not cast to an array of ints, but time was short and I was under pressure, and it worked

Next, I used switch to build a filter that returns the possible letters for any given number. If I pass in a 2,  I get back a string of ABC.

Next I used multiple assignment to get all the possibilities for each number.

I used these to build a big ol’ regex pattern. It’s long but relatively simple. Basically just creates 7 chars using the [] for “this OR that OR the other thing.”

For example, if the first two numbers were 2 and 3, it would generate [abc][def] as the pattern.

Once I built up that pattern, I simply used get-content of the word list and piped that to Select-String and gave Select-String the the regex pattern I created.

In my first attempt, I created a list of all possibilities and then did a -match on them and compared to the word list file.

Using regex and Select-String brought my execution time down from 23 minutes to about 7 seconds, give or take.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Games 2008, Powershell, Scripting, Scripting Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.