scrabble-trie

A word list storage and searching mechanism for Scrabble-like games, using the trie data structure. Provides easy searching of a dictionary to find words which can be made from certain letters, with any number of wildcard (or "blank") letters.

About tries

The Wikipedia article on tries is a good place to start if one is unfamiliar with the trie data structure.

Creating a trie

There are three ways to create a trie object.

By calling the constructor manually, and then populating the values:

const trie = new Trie();
trie.addValue('foo');
trie.addValue('bar');

alternatively, by calling the static fromWordList method:

const trie = Trie.fromWordList(['foo', 'bar']);

finally, if there is a list of words stored in a file, separated by newlines, the (async) static fromFile method may be used:

const trie = await Trie.fromFile('/path/to/file.txt');

Searching a trie

Basic searching

const trie = Trie.fromWordList(['foo', 'food', 'foods', 'bar']);
trie.search('food'); // ['foo', food']

Searching with wildcards

const trie = Trie.fromWordList(['foo', 'food', 'foods', 'bar']);

// search with the letters "food", plus one wildcard
trie.search('food', 1); // ['foo', 'food', 'foods']

// search with no letters, but three wildcards
trie.search('', 3); // ['foo', 'bar']