This is actually a c++ question...

Basically I am creating a program that asks for five characters. I have a dictionary file containing tons of words no long than five letters long, on a seperate line. I want to be able to take the five inputted letters and compare them to the words in the file so it may output words that may be created from the characters. I have done most of the grunt work: Setting up the interface, variables, and file stuff (streams), but I do not know how to compare the characters to the strings in the file.

Thanks for the help
-Robert

PS. If you need me to post my source code, just ask.

let me make sure I understand the problem :
So, you have a file of english words. when the program starts it prompts the user to enter a char string of no longer than 5 elements, then the program will scan through the file to see if all the characters of user input match any of the words in the file; if so it will output all the matching(created) words.
Example : say your file file.dat contains

beer
apple
bread
read
dear
dare

and you enter as input : aerd

then your program will spit out the 3 words in the file : read, dear, dare since they match all chars in the input. Is that correct? Or should it match the whole word as is, that is, if you enter aerd, it will look necessarily for aerd?

Yes, absolutly how you thought, the letters will be scrambled - except I named my file dict.dat instead of file.dat, hehe. If you could help me with it, since you appear to understand what will happen, I will be most thankful!

-Robert

# inlcude <string>
# include <cstring>

void print_matching_words(string) ;
bool compare(const string, const string) ;

int main( )
{
  // read contents of the file to an array large enough
  // to hold all words in file, say words[]
  
  cout << "enter a character string :" ;   // there should be no space between input char's
  cin >> input ;
  
  print_matching_words(input) ;
  return 0 ;
}

void print_matching_words(string input)
{
  int s_size strlen(input) ;
  
  for(int i=0; i<num_of_all_words; i++)   // for all words in file
    if(s_size == strlen(words[i])        // first figure out if size match
      if(compare(input, words[i]) )      // compare to see if both have same chars
        cout << words[i] << endl ;       // if so, we found it, print it out 
}

bool compare(const string input, const string word)
{
  string temp[strlen(input)] ;
  bool found = true ;
  strcpy(temp, word) ;   // copy word to temp one
  
  for(int i=0; found && i<strlen(input); i++)   // check all char's of input
    for(int k=0; k<strlen(input); k++)      // for all char's of compared word
    {  if(temp[k] && (input[i] == temp[k]) )   // if we found the char
       {  temp[k] = '\0' ;      // mark it off, so that we'll not encounter it again
          break ;             // break out of the loop
       }
       if(k == strlen(input) - 1)   // if we're at the end of temp and haven't found
         found = false ;          // the char in input yet, this word doesn't match
    }                             // we need to return false
  return found ;
}