Converting array elements into a string

Afternoon all, and Happy Easter!

I'm still working on my 'mini' word game, and would like some advice on the following. I have an array of 30 elements, each of which can contain a letter. So, if the player has picked the following letters:

B L I T Z

The array would be:

1-B
2-L
3-I
4-T
5-Z
6 to 30-""

How could I then take this, and then 'concatenate' the values into a variable, so, instead of the individual elements, I'd have:

WORD="BLITZ"

I can then check this against a dictionary I have to see if it is a valid word... ;)

Many thanks,
M

why not use INSTR to check whether the given word is in the dictionary?

Hiya,

I will be doing that ultimately, but it's getting my individual letters into a string that I'm struggling with. Hope that's clear... ;)

Cheers

a:String = ""
For Local temp:String = EachIn array
	a:+ temp
Next

Ah! Stingly simple! Many thanks, will implement it now!

Cheers!

arf, check, didn't read the Q too well :P

No probs. ;)

Although now, I am having problems with checking if the word is in my dictionary. The dictionary has 216552 entries in it, and I've tried a For...Next... loop, but to no avail.

Variables I have:

DIC[216552] - Array with all words present (dictionary)
WORDSTRING - The word I wish to check if it is in the dictionary.

I tried:

For b=0 To 216552
	   If WORDSTRING=DIC[b] Then
                 *** do stuff here ***
                 WORDSTRING=""
	   End If
      Next

but it didn't play ball... :(

Any ideas?

:)

omg, you really want to check over 200.000 words, each time you need to check? :D

I don't want to have to, but can't think of any other way? :( I did get something similar working in B3D, and it didn't take any time at all using a similar sort of method. ;)

Any other suggestions?

Look up TMap in the documentation. If you use one to hold your dictionary, it will speed things up no end, and make things a little easier as well.

Is TMap always fast? I'm not entirely sure how it works, but does it internally run through the whole given data to find a match? Is there a best-case and worst-case scenario with TMap?

Hmm, not encountered TMap yet, will take a look. Many thanks, M.

It's a binary tree internally, I think. So a search through it is a binary search. It's always fast if you have a lot of data to search through which can be sorted on a key, yeah. Of course, it takes longer to insert and remove items because they have to be inserted to the correct place in the map. But in a dictionary, you don't remove and insert words very often, if at all, so there's no downside.

The dictionary will be 'fixed' so once it's loaded into the 'tree' or 'list' it'll not change during execution. :)

...and translate everything to lowercase when you do checks in case you're checking "Rabbit" with "rabbit"

No. It depends on how you use it. It's implemented as a Red-Black Tree. If you want the fastest possible lookup, you should go for a Radix Tree like say, a Patricia Tree.

As far as I can tell though, nobody has so far made such a data structure in BlitzMAX. Could be wrong tho' so it probably wouldn't hurt to search the Code Archives for Radix.

Maybe this will help and this too?