Using regular expressions to find a word with the five letters abcde, each letter appearing exactly once, in any order, with no breaks in between

Question

For example, the word debacle would work because of debac, but seabed would not work because: 1. there is no c in any 5-character sequence that can be formed, and 2. the letter e appears twice. As another example, feedback would work because of edbac. And remember, the solution must be done using only regular expressions.

A strategy I attempted to implement was: match the first letter if it's inside [a-e], and remember it. Then find the next letter in [a-e] but not the first letter. And so on. I wasn't sure what the syntax was (or even if some syntax existed) so my code didn't work:

open(DICT, "dictionary.txt");
@words = <DICT>;

foreach my $word(@words){

if ($word =~ /([a-e])([a-e^\1])([a-e^\1^\2])([a-e^\1^\2^\3])([a-e^\1^\2^\3^\4])/
){
    print $word;
}
}

I was also thinking of using (?=regex) and \G but I wasn't sure how it would work out.

Answer 1

/
   (?= .{0,4}a )
   (?= .{0,4}b )
   (?= .{0,4}c )
   (?= .{0,4}d )
   (?= .{0,4}e )
/xs

---

It's probably results in faster matching to generate a pattern from all combinations.

use Algorithm::Loops qw( NextPermute );
my @pats;
my @chars = 'a'..'e';
do { push @pats, quotemeta join '', @chars; } while NextPermute(@chars);
my $re = join '|', @pats;

abcde|abced|abdce|abdec|abecd|abedc|acbde|acbed|acdbe|acdeb|acebd|acedb|adbce|adbec|adcbe|adceb|adebc|adecb|aebcd|aebdc|aecbd|aecdb|aedbc|aedcb|bacde|baced|badce|badec|baecd|baedc|bcade|bcaed|bcdae|bcdea|bcead|bceda|bdace|bdaec|bdcae|bdcea|bdeac|bdeca|beacd|beadc|becad|becda|bedac|bedca|cabde|cabed|cadbe|cadeb|caebd|caedb|cbade|cbaed|cbdae|cbdea|cbead|cbeda|cdabe|cdaeb|cdbae|cdbea|cdeab|cdeba|ceabd|ceadb|cebad|cebda|cedab|cedba|dabce|dabec|dacbe|daceb|daebc|daecb|dbace|dbaec|dbcae|dbcea|dbeac|dbeca|dcabe|dcaeb|dcbae|dcbea|dceab|dceba|deabc|deacb|debac|debca|decab|decba|eabcd|eabdc|eacbd|eacdb|eadbc|eadcb|ebacd|ebadc|ebcad|ebcda|ebdac|ebdca|ecabd|ecadb|ecbad|ecbda|ecdab|ecdba|edabc|edacb|edbac|edbca|edcab|edcba

(This will get optimised into a trie in Perl 5.10+. Before 5.10, use Regexp::List.)