Okay, so I wanted to mess around with crossword puzzles, specifically how they’re stored and maybe even generated. I’ve always been fascinated by them, and I figured, “Why not dive in?”
I started by, you know, just thinking about it. How would I even represent a crossword in code? My first thought was a simple 2D array. A grid, right? Each cell could be a letter or a blank space. Seemed straightforward enough.
Initial Attempts (and Failures)
I played around with creating a few grids manually in Python. Just lists of lists. Filled them with some dummy data. It worked, kinda. I could print them out, see the “crossword.” But it felt… clunky. Very manual.
Then I thought, “Okay, how do I handle the clues?” My initial idea was to have separate lists of across and down clues, each with a starting position and a number. Something like:
- Across:
- 1. A fruit (4 letters) – (0, 0)
- 5. A color (3 letters) – (0, 4)
- Down:
- 1. A drink (5 letters) – (0, 0)
- 2. An animal (3 letters) – (1, 0)
I tried implementing this, storing the coordinates and clue text. But it quickly became messy. How do I efficiently check for intersections? How do I know if a word even fits at a given position?
Realizations and Refinements
It became clear pretty fast that just a raw 2D array wasn’t going to cut it. I needed something more… structured. I needed a way to represent not just the letters, but also the relationships between the cells.
I spent some time Googling around, looking at how other people have tackled this. I didn’t want to use a pre-built library; I wanted to understand the how. I stumbled upon some discussions about using dictionaries or hash maps, where keys could represent cell positions, and values could hold information about the cell (letter, across word number, down word number, etc.).
So I started experimenting with this approach. I created a dictionary where the keys were tuples (row, column), and the values were little objects (or dictionaries, in Python) containing:
- The letter (if any) in that cell.
- The across word number it belonged to (if any).
- The down word number it belonged to (if any).
This felt much better. I could easily access any cell, check if it was part of an across or down word, and quickly get its neighbors. Checking for intersections became trivial – just see if adjacent cells shared the same across or down word number.
Putting It Together (Sort Of)
I wrote some functions to populate this dictionary structure from a simple text-based representation of a crossword (like “….*” for a row). I also wrote functions to print it out nicely, showing the grid and the word numbers.
It’s still a work in progress, obviously. I haven’t even touched on generating crosswords, which is a whole other beast. But just getting to this point, where I have a reasonably good way to represent a crossword and its data, felt like a big step. I’m actually feeling pretty good about being able to build up this structure and it’s not like anything I’ve done in the past.
My next will be to try adding functions that will automatically handle inserting a word.
