Good algorithm and data structure for looking up words with missing letters?

Question

so I need to write an efficient algorithm for looking up words with missing letters in a dictionary and I want the set of possible words.

For example, if I have th??

Answer 1

Summary: Use two compact binary-searched indexes, one of the words, and one of the reversed words. The space cost is 2N pointers for the indexes; almost all lookups go very fast; the worst case, "??e", is still decent. If you make separate tables for each word length, that'd make even the worst case very fast.

Details: Stephen C. posted a good idea: search an ordered dictionary to find the range where the pattern can appear. This doesn't help, though, when the pattern starts with a wildcard. You might also index by word-length, but here's another idea: add an ordered index on the reversed dictionary words; then a pattern always yields a small range in either the forward index or the reversed-word index (since we're told there are no patterns like ?ABCD?). The words themselves need be stored only once, with the entries of both structures pointing to the same words, and the lookup procedure viewing them either forwards or in reverse; but to use Python's built-in binary-search function I've made two separate strings arrays instead, wasting some space. (I'm using a sorted array instead of a tree as others have suggested, as it saves space and goes at least as fast.)

Code:

import bisect, re

def forward(string): return string
def reverse(string): return string[::-1]

index_forward = sorted(line.rstrip('\n')
                       for line in open('/usr/share/dict/words'))
index_reverse = sorted(map(reverse, index_forward))

def lookup(pattern):
    "Return a list of the dictionary words that match pattern."
    if reverse(pattern).find('?') <= pattern.find('?'):
        key, index, fixup = pattern, index_forward, forward
    else:
        key, index, fixup = reverse(pattern), index_reverse, reverse
    assert all(c.isalpha() or c == '?' for c in pattern)
    lo = bisect.bisect_left(index, key.replace('?', 'A'))
    hi = bisect.bisect_right(index, key.replace('?', 'z'))
    r = re.compile(pattern.replace('?', '.') + '$')
    return filter(r.match, (fixup(index[i]) for i in range(lo, hi)))

Tests: (The code also works for patterns like ?AB?D?, though without the speed guarantee.)

>>> lookup('hello')
['hello']
>>> lookup('??llo')
['callo', 'cello', 'hello', 'uhllo', 'Rollo', 'hollo', 'nullo']
>>> lookup('hel??')
['helio', 'helix', 'hello', 'helly', 'heloe', 'helve']
>>> lookup('he?l')
['heal', 'heel', 'hell', 'heml', 'herl']
>>> lookup('hx?l')
[]

Efficiency: This needs 2N pointers plus the space needed to store the dictionary-word text (in the tuned version). The worst-case time comes on the pattern '??e' which looks at 44062 candidates in my 235k-word /usr/share/dict/words; but almost all queries are much faster, like 'h??lo' looking at 190, and indexing first on word-length would reduce '??e' almost to nothing if we need to. Each candidate-check goes faster than the hashtable lookups others have suggested.

This resembles the rotations-index solution, which avoids all false match candidates at the cost of needing about 10N pointers instead of 2N (supposing an average word-length of about 10, as in my /usr/share/dict/words).

You could do a single binary search per lookup, instead of two, using a custom search function that searches for both low-bound and high-bound together (so the shared part of the search isn't repeated).