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Ashu
Asked: 2018-04-09 06:07:45 +0800 CST

How to find words with the same letters using a shell script

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I want to write a script which will accept a line of text and should tell me if any of the words are made up of the same letters. Here is an example:

How can you listen if you are not silent?

Here 'listen' and 'silent' are made up of exactly same letters with same frequency.

Any help?

scripts command-line

2 Answers

  1. Presented without commentary:

    ruby -rset -e '
  readlines.each {|sentence| 
    p sentence
    data = Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = Set.new}
    sentence.scan(/\w+/).each {|word| data[word.chars.sort] << word }
    p data.each_value.select {|set| set.size > 1}.collect(&:to_a)
  }
' << END
How can you listen if you are not silent?
I saw a tap; it was apt
END

    "How can you listen if you are not silent?\n"
[["listen", "silent"]]
"I saw a tap; it was apt\n"
[["saw", "was"], ["tap", "apt"]]
    • 3

  2. This will list the frequency of each space-delimited set of characters in the sentence:

    echo 'How can you listen if you are not silent?' \
| tr -cd '[:alpha:][:space:]' \
| tr '[:upper:][:space:]' '[:lower:]\n' \
| while read a; do grep -o .<<<$a | sort | tr -d '\n'; echo; done \
| sort | uniq -c | sort

    Output:

      1 acn
  1 aer
  1 fi
  1 how
  1 not
  2 eilnst
  2 ouy

    It's not very elegant and probably you should be using something else than shell.

    • 2