I'm definitely a newbie and am trying a practice project. Its basically an anagram game where the user clicks on certain letters to put together a word. I now need to check that it is actually a word. I've made a text file containing all the words in the dictionary (copied from someones website as its just a practice project). I've managed to get it so that if I can console.log the words.

function Searchtext(){
    $.get('words.txt', function(data) {
console.log(data);



}, 'text');
    }

Now I want to search the words to see if the player's answer ( a string which is declared in a variable called playeranswer ) is in the list. I don't need it to return the word, only whether it is there or not. N.B. it has to be exact so that for example if the user entered "ender" which isnt a word, it wont e back true because it finds the word "render". Maybe something with the .length will help?

How would I go about doing this?

Thanks for any help.

I'm definitely a newbie and am trying a practice project. Its basically an anagram game where the user clicks on certain letters to put together a word. I now need to check that it is actually a word. I've made a text file containing all the words in the dictionary (copied from someones website as its just a practice project). I've managed to get it so that if I can console.log the words.

function Searchtext(){
    $.get('words.txt', function(data) {
console.log(data);



}, 'text');
    }

Now I want to search the words to see if the player's answer ( a string which is declared in a variable called playeranswer ) is in the list. I don't need it to return the word, only whether it is there or not. N.B. it has to be exact so that for example if the user entered "ender" which isnt a word, it wont e back true because it finds the word "render". Maybe something with the .length will help?

How would I go about doing this?

Thanks for any help.

• javascript
• jquery
• search

• Regex docs for reference. – ajp15243 Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 20:59
• You're aiming at doing a server call every time user tries to verify the word? Why not just put all the words there in the javascript variable in first place? Do you have any server-side programming language? if yes then why not check on server side and return true/false? – Ejaz Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 21:10
• its just for a practice project, no one other than me is going to see it so it doesn't really matter. The only reason its in a separate text file is just for ease. Regex seems to be working for the moment! – Truvia Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 21:14
• I agree with @Ejay - parse the words once into an array and then manage the search on the array. - practice on parsing as well! – Mark Schultheiss Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 21:18
• I'm finding it difficult to find somewhere clear that explains parsing: I'd like to clean up my coding so if anyone has a link? – Truvia Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 22:36

4 Answers 4

Since $.get is asynchronous, you'll have to set it up a little differently. I'd do this:

function Searchtext(name, callback) {
    $.get('words.txt', function(data) {
        data = data.split("\n");
        var contains = (data.indexOf(name) > -1);
        callback(contains);
    }, 'text');
}

Depending on how the text file is setup, you might have to change .split("\n") (which splits up the words into an array, if they're each on a line) to .split(" ") (which splits up the words into an array, if they're separated by a space).

And you'd call it like:

SearchText(playername, function (matched) {
    if (matched) {
        // Name was in list
    } else {
        // Name wasn't in list
    }
});

DEMO: http://jsfiddle/Fkr5B/

In the demo, I had to simulate the AJAX request.

I would use a regular expression (using a RegExp object) for this. Here is a simple example that tries to match a word in two different strings of words:

var word_to_match = 'ender';
var string_of_words = 'a string containing the word ender, this will match';
var second_string_of_words = 'a string that will not produce a match';

//use \b to match on word boundaries
var filter = new RegExp('\\b' + word_to_match + '\\b', 'gi');

if(string_of_words.match(filter)) {
    alert('found word: ' + word_to_match);
} else {
    alert('did not find word: ' + word_to_match);
}

if(second_string_of_words.match(filter)) {
    alert('found word: ' + word_to_match);
} else {
    alert('did not find word: ' + word_to_match);
}

You'll see the first if statement passes, while the second fails. A little reading might be required, but you should be able to expand this example to fit your use case.

You should first parse the data variable and place the words into an Array. Then you can test if the user entered a valid word by checking if your Array contains that word.

var Dict = new Array("render", "bender", "word");

function isValid(word){
    if(Dict.indexOf(word) == -1) 
        return false; //the word is not valid
    return true; //the word is valid
}    

I've made this simple script, hope it helps

$(document).ready(function(e) {
    function parseData(data) {
    $('#inpu').blur(function() {
        var str_to_search = $.trim($('#inpu').val());
        if(str_to_search.length) {
            var search_res = data.search(str_to_search);
            if(search_res != -1) {
                alert('Word Valid!');
            } else {
                alert('Word no valid');
            }
        }
    });
}
$.get('to_search.txt', parseData).fail(function() { alert('error');});
});