Working with huge text files in Java

Question

I was given an English vocabulary assignment by my teacher.

Choose a random alphabet, say 'a' Write a word from the alphabet, say 'apple' Take the last word 'e' Write a word from e, say elephant Now from 't' and so on.. No repetition allowed

Make a list of 500 words. Mail the list to the teacher. :)

So Instead of doing it myself, I am working on a Java code which will do my homework for me. The code seems to be simple.

The core of algorithm: Pick up a random word from a dictionary, which satisfies the requirement. seek() with RandomAccessFile. Try to put it in a Set with ordering (maybe LinkedHashSet)

But the problem is the huge size of dictionary with 300 000+ enteries. :| Brute force random algorithms wont work.

What could be the best, quickest and most efficient way out?

****UPDATE :** Now that I have written the code and its working. How can I make it efficient so that it chooses common words? Any text files containing list of common words around??**

Answer 1

Either look for a data structure allowing you to keep a compacted dictionary in memory, or simply give your process more memory. Three hundred thousand words is not that much.