wordle-aid 2.9

CLI program to filter word choices to aid solving Wordle game problems

WORDLE-AID

wordle-aid is a Linux command line program to filter word choices to aid solving Wordle problems. You run this program specifying your previous guesses and results, and then the program outputs a list of candidate words in English frequency usage order to your terminal. Wordle-aid uses the pyspellchecker package for its source of English dictionary words and frequencies.

The following example Wordle (#21) solution illustrates how to use it.

1. Choose any starting word as normal. You can even use wordle-aid to help with this, e.g.

   # print all 5 letter words, in reverse frequency order to screen:
   $ wordle-aid .....
   
   # Or, print all 5 letter words with at least 3 vowels:
   $ wordle-aid -v3 .....
   
   # Or, print all 5 letter words with at least 3 vowels and all unique letters:
   $ wordle-aid -v3 -u .....
   

2. We choose our favorite starting word TRACE as the first guess, which gives the result shown on the first line of the image above. Based on this result, run:

   $ wordle-aid TracE ..a..
   neath 55
   keats 57
   yeats 148
   beaut 168
   exalt 352
   leant 380
   heath 467
   meaty 726
   meats 1028
   feats 1189
   heats 1539
   yeast 1587
   leapt 1884
   feast 12436
   seats 18355
   dealt 19971
   beast 22995
   beats 31332
   meant 212776
   death 285290
   least 456376
   

   The output above is the list of possible candidate words, given the command line word arguments you have specified.

   Note: Specify the 1st guess word you used and set each yellow (i.e. correct but incorrect position) letter to upper-case, and other letters to lower-case. Specify all green (i.e. correct and in position) letters you have found so far in the right (wildcard) field in their correct position.

3. Choose a word from the suggestion list output from above command. We choose to enter the highest frequency candidate LEAST from the list, which gives the result shown on the second line in the image above. Then run:

   $ wordle-aid TracE leasT .ea..
   neath 55
   heath 467
   meaty 726
   death 285290
   

4. Choose a word from the suggestion list output from the above command. We choose to enter the highest frequency result DEATH, which gives us the final correct answer.

In summary, specify ..... (all wildcards) as your starting result and insert characters to it as your find them, i.e. all green letters from each guess. Note that the number of wildcard characters determines the Wordle game word size (e.g. wordle-aid bundle ...... for a 6 letter game). Specify your previous word guesses earlier on the command line. They don't actually have to be in the order that you guessed them although likely you will be re-editing from your command history so they will be. Yellow letter guesses (i.e. letter valid but in incorrect place) are entered as upper case, and dark/grey letter guesses (i.e. letter not present anywhere) are entered as lower case. Green letters (i.e. letter valid and in correct place) can be lower or upper case in the earlier word arguments, but must be specified in the final wildcard word (as either lower or upper case) .

Example Minimal Solver

Wordle-aid also includes an example solver, invoked by the -s/--solve option to solve in the mininum number of steps assuming the most frequent candidate word is chosen each step. E.g to see an example solution for the above word DEATH:

$ wordle-aid -s death
1 about [AbouT .....]
2 thank [THank ..a..]
3 death [death death] SOLVED

You can also specify 1 or more starting words, e.g if we start with the same word TRACE as we chose for the opening example above then we get the same sequence of word candidates as the example (because wordle-aid selects the highest frequency candidate each step as we manually did in the example).

$ wordle-aid -s trace death
1 trace [TracE ..a..]
2 least [leasT .ea..]
3 death [death death] SOLVED

Or, use a different second word for the example:

$ wordle-aid -s trace stamp death
1 trace [TracE ..a..]
2 stamp [sTamp ..a..]
3 death [death death] SOLVED

But default, unless you have specified a word for a step, wordle-aid selects the highest frequency word candidate each solver iteration. To introduce some randomness, you can instead tell wordle-aid to randomly choose a candidate from within the top N candidates by including the -r/--random option, e.g:

$ wordle-aid -s -r20 death
1 right [rigHT .....]
2 hates [HATEs .....]
3 teach [Teach .ea.h]
4 neath [neath .eath]
5 death [death death] SOLVED

Or from the top N percentage of candidates:

$ wordle-aid -s -r20% death
1 bonus [bonus .....]
2 cigar [cigAr .....]
3 taped [TApED .....]
4 death [death death] SOLVED

Simple Python API

This program takes command line options and arguments and then writes to standard output. If you instead want to run it programmatically from another calling python program (e.g. for a simulation/test) then you can import and run it as a module. The main code is wrapped within a function signature:

def run(args: Union[List[str], str], fp: TextIO = sys.stdout, *,
        read_start_options: bool = False) -> None

So you provide a list of option/argument strings (or a single command line string) and pass in a string buffer which the program will write to instead of standard output. E.g, as a simple example:

#!/usr/bin/python3
import io
import wordle_aid

buf = io.StringIO()
wordle_aid.run('-v4 .....', buf)
topword = buf.getvalue().splitlines()[-1]

# Output top frequency 5 letter word which has 4 vowels:
print(topword.split()[0])

A real example is this script to automatically solve a list of words and calculate the average number of guesses.

Installation or Upgrade

Wordle-aid runs on pure Python and requires the pyspellchecker 3rd party package.

Arch users can install wordle-aid from the AUR.

Python 3.7 or later is required. Note wordle-aid is on PyPI so just ensure that pipx is installed then type the following:

$ pipx install wordle-aid

To upgrade:

$ pipx upgrade wordle-aid

Command Line Options

Type wordle-aid -h to view the usage summary:

usage: wordle-aid [-h] [-l LANGUAGE] [-v VOWELS] [-u] [-w WORDS_FILE]
                     [-e EXCLUDE_WORDS_FILE] [-s] [-r RANDOM] [-c] [-V]
                     [words ...]

CLI program to filter word choices to aid solving Wordle game problems.

positional arguments:
  words                 list of attempted words. Upper case letter is right
                        letter but wrong place. Lower case letter is wrong
                        letter anywhere. Last word is wildcards for current
                        matches.

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -l LANGUAGE, --language LANGUAGE
                        pyspellchecker language dictionary to use,
                        default="en"
  -v VOWELS, --vowels VOWELS
                        exclude words with less than this number of unique
                        vowels
  -u, --unique          exclude words with non-unique letters
  -w WORDS_FILE, --words-file WORDS_FILE
                        filter dictionary to words in given text file. Use
                        multiple times to specify multiple files.
  -e EXCLUDE_WORDS_FILE, --exclude-words-file EXCLUDE_WORDS_FILE
                        exclude words in given text file. Use multiple times
                        to specify multiple files.
  -s, --solve           solve to final given word, starting with earlier given
                        words (if any)
  -r RANDOM, --random RANDOM
                        choose word for solver at each step randomly from
                        given number (or %) of top candidates, default=1
  -c, --no-colors       don't show colors in solver output
  -V, --version         show wordle-aid version

Note you can set default starting options in "$HOME/.config/wordle-aid-
flags.conf".

License

Copyright (C) 2022 Mark Blakeney. This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License for more details.