I need an script for generating crossword game. I have a list of 8 words for which I wnat to generate a crossword game, let's say for 15 column and 15 row.
I am not getting the concept of this problem. How to generate this using PHP ?? Can anyone tell me how to do that ??
I think that sounds easier than it is in practice, certainly when you only start with a list of 15-20 words. It is very difficult this way to put those words into a crossword. In most cases it will even be impossible...
I think this is a fun idea and i will try that some time, should be possible. Of couse you never know if there is a posibility for the given words in the given size, but if you try tons of combinations with an algorithm i think that should get some "acceptable" results.
I'd just start with the first word put it on the map, and then you try all other words left in all positions. And so on. So you get really a damn lot of combinations, which you could delete if they break you wanted size, and in the end you might have a nice list of possibilites and show like the 10 smallest of that to choose from. My GF is away this weekend, maybe ill have a try. I think recursive could be the right way to do that.
Related
thanks for taking the time to read this.
My goal here is to rotate between links, anywhere from 1 link up to, let's say 4.
The easy way to do this, would be to make an array of the links and using php, pick one randomly to display.
While this is pretty easy, and quick to set up, it also has me worried a bit, because it's not really accurate, especially not on a small scale.
Giving you some numbers here, let's say my website gets anywhere from 3000 to 5000 unique impressions a day, how accurate would it be to randomly pick a link from an array for 2, 3 or 4 links to choose from?
If anyone else has an idea on how to make a system that rotates very accurate and evenly, let me know!
Thanks in advance to anyone that can help me out :)
Over a lengthy period of time with many impressions, most random functions would be evenly distributed. For a small distribution, the results may be noticeably skewed... but the more
But for perfectly even distribution, nothing beats a straight cafeteria-plate "next-up" array.
Either way, I think you will be satisfied.
I have a table with a column that includes names like:
Home Improvement Guide
Home Improvement Advice
Home Improvement Costs
Home Gardening Tips
I would like the result to be:
Home Improvement
Home Gardening Tips
Based on a search for the word 'Home'.
This can be accomplished in MySQL or PHP or a combination of the two. I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure this out, any help in the right directly would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Edit / Problem kinda solved:
I think this problem can be solved much easier by changing the logic a little. For anyone else with this problem, here is my solution.
Get the sql results
Find the first occurrence of the searched word, one string at a time, and get the next word in the string to the right of it.
The results would include the searched word concatenated with the distinct adjoining word.
Not as good of a solution, but it works for my project. Thanks for the help everyone.
This is too long for a comment.
I don't think that Levenshtein distance does what you want. Consider:
Home Improvement
Home Improvement Advice on Kitchen Remodeling
Home Gardening
The first and third are closer by the Levenshtein measure than the first and third. And yet, I'm guessing that you want the first and second to be paired.
I have an idea of the algorithm you want. Something like this:
Compare every returned string to every other string
Measure the length of the initial overlap
Find the maximum over all the strings strings, pair those
Repeat the process with the second largest overlap and so on
Painful, but not impossible to implement in SQL. Maybe very painful.
What this suggests to me is that you are looking for a hierarchy among the products. My suggestion is to just include a category column and return the category. You may need to manually insert the categories into your data.
I run a photo website where users are free to enter any tag they like, even tags not used before. As a result, a photo of a tag may sometimes be tagged as "insect" whilst somebody else tags it as "insects".
I'd like to keep the free-tagging capability, yet would like to have a way to filter out such near-duplicates. The total collection of tags is currently at 1,500. My idea is to read all of them from the DB into mem and then run an alghoritm on it that displays "suspects".
My idea of a suspect is that x% of the characters in the string are the same (same char and order), where x is configurable. I could probably code a really inefficient way to do this but I was wondering if there is an existing solution to this problem?
Edit: Forgot to mention: just sorting the tags isn't enough, as that would require me to go through the entire set to find dupes.
There are some flaws in your logic. For example, what happens when the plural of an object is different from the singular (i.e. person vs. people or even candy vs. candies).
If English is the primary language, check out Soundex which allows phonetic matches. Also consider using a crowd-sourced synonym model where users can create links to existing tags.
Maybe the algorithm you are looking for is approximate string matching.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching.
by a given word you can match it to list of words and if the 'distance' is close add it to suspects.
A fast implementation is to use dynamic programming like the Needleman–Wunsch algorithm.
I have made a blog example of this in C# where you can configure the 'distance' using a matrix character lookup file.
http://kunuk.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/dynamic-programming-example-with-c-using-needleman-wunsch-algorithm/
Is "either contains either" fine? You could do a SQL query something like this, if your images are in a database (which would only make sense):
SELECT * FROM ImageTags WHERE INSTR('theNewTag', TagName) > 0 OR INSTR(TagName, 'theNewTag') > 0 LIMIT 1;
If you really want to do this efficiently I would suggest some sort of JavaScript implementation that displays possibilities as the user is typing in a tag that they want. Not only will it save the user time to happily see 5 suggestions as they type. It will automatically stop them from typing "suspects" when "suspect" shows up as a suggestion. That is, of course, unless they really want "suspects" as a point of urgency.
You could load a huge list of words and as the user types narrow them down. I get the feeling that this could be very simplistic esp if you want to anticipate correctly spelled words. If someone misses a letter, they'll probably go back to fix it when they see a list of suggestions that isn't at all what they meant to type. And when they do correctly type a word it'll pop up in the suggestions.
I need advice regarding text analysis.
The program is written in php.
My code needs to receive a URL and match the site words against the DB and seek for a match.
The tricky part is that the words aren't allways written in the DB as they appear in the text.
example:
Let's say my DB has these values:
Word = letters
And the site has:
Wordy thing
I'm supposed to output:
Letters thing
My code makes several regex an after each one tries to match the searched word against the DB.
For each word that isn't found I make 8 queries to the DB. Most of the words don't have a match so when we talk about a whole website that has hundreds of words my CPU level makes a jump.
I thought about storing every word not found in the DB globaly as they appear ( HD costs less than CPU ) or maybe making an array or dictionary to store all of that.
I'm really confused with this project. It's supposed to serve a lot of users, with the current code the server will die after 10-20 user requests.
Any thoughts?
Edit:
The searched words aren't English words and the code runs in a windows 2008 server
Implement a trie and compute levenstein distance? See this blog for a detailed walkthrough of implementation: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=114
Seems to me like a job for Sphynx & stemming.
Possibly stupid question but have you considered using a LIKE clause in your SQL query?
Something like this:
$sql = "SELECT * FROM `your_table` WHERE `your_field` LIKE 'your_search'":
I've usually found whenever I have to do too much string manipulation on return values from a query I can get it done easier on the SQL side.
Thank you all for your answers.
Unfortunately none of the answers helped me, maybe I wasn't clear enough.
I ended up solving the issue by creating a hash table with all of the words on the DB (about 6000 words), and checking against the hash instead of the DB.
The code started up with 4 sec execution time and now it's 0.5 sec! :-)
Thanks again
The subject is probably not as clear as it could be, but I was struggling to think of a better way to easily describe it.
I am implementing a badword filter on some articles that we pick up from an XML feed. At the moment I have the badwords in an array and simply check the text like so;
str_replace($badwords, '', $text, $count);
if ($count > 0) // We have bad words...
But this is SLOW! So slow! And when I am trying to process 30,000+ articles at a time, I start wondering if there is a better way to achieve this. If only strpos supported arrays! Even then I dont think it'd be faster...
I'd love any suggestions. Thanks in advance!
EDIT:
I have now tested a few methods between calls to microtime() to time them.
str_replace() = 990 seconds
preg_match() = 1029 seconds (Remember I only need to identify them, not replace them)
no bad word filtering = 1057 seconds (presumably because it has another thousand or so bad-worded articles to process.
Thanks for all the answers, I will just still with str_replace. :)
How about combining all the words in a regex to replace everything in one go? I'm not sure how it will go for performance but it might be faster.
E.g.
preg_replace('/(' . implode('|', $badwords) . ')/i', '', $text);
i used to work at my local newspaper office. instead of modifying the text to delete badwords from the original files, what i did was just run a filter when a user requested to view the article. this way you preserve the original text should you ever need it, but also dish out a clean version for your viewers. there should be no need to process 30,000 articles at once unless i am misunderstanding something.
Define "slow"? Anything that's going to be processing 30,000 articles is probably going to take a bit of time to complete.
That said, one option (which I have not benchmarked, just tossing it out there for consideration) would be to combine the words into a regex and run that through preg_replace (just using the | operator to put them together).
In case these previous questions are useful:
How do you implement a good
profanity filter?
How do I replace bad words with
php?
Blacklist of words on content to
filter message.
Trouble with simple PHP profanity
filter