Shell Programming and Scripting

Crona688 ,
No this is not Homework. Perhaps you do not understand no one ll come up with such a bogus homework. It was my thinking to convert a crossword in a program. : ).
I made already horizontal and vertical lines to find the words ~35 out of 50 states located, remaing are hiding in the diagonal lines, Diagonal ways of crossword are tricky to match with, so I was checking for some ideas.
This was when in a place far away from my home and I was waiting 5+hrs doing nothing and someone handed me over a game paper to pass the time, I was thinking to program it. But seems it is not a good idea spending more time on it, as crosswords are meant for spending the time on that, not to be programmed. But if I spend some time I can iterate it in the other 3 sides , i am able to figured that out, from the code from RudiC. Thanks for visiting.

You are probably right regarding the crosswords, but on the other hand if you can solve it with a program you will hone your programming skills, so the best solution might be to write the program first and then not to use it to solve crosswords. ;-))

I think "awk" and similar text filters are not well suited for this problem, because they generally read a file linewise from top to bottom. What you really need is a two-dimensional array of characters which you can search in every direction (not only downwards) using index-arithmetics. You can have such an array using "ksh93" or "bash" by using the substring function for the second index or you can use "perl" or similar languages (phyton, ruby, ...). Have fun programming.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Bakunin,
Many Thanks , I ll try with ksh93 or bash , or perl.
Python not yet experienced. 2D Array ll be helpful in this case as well . Thank you for the logic & excellent reply.