All possible word combinations from a set of hanzi

[XiaoZhou]

Does anyone know of a website where I can paste in a group of characters and it will tell me all of the possible words that these characters can produce? For example, if I pasted (or typed) 好 and 你 then it would tell me that I can make the word 你好, except on a large scale with dozens of characters? I've seen this before several years ago, but I don't know where. Can anyone help me?

[Chief123]

www.mdbg.net may be helpful. You can type a character (or more than one) and see all words in the dictionary that start with that character, end with that character, or include that character.

Mark

[roddy]

I had something like that up several years ago, but it was never very polished and only worked within the scope of the HSK lists. It's not particularly difficult to do, but it could put a bit of a load on a server I guess.

[mikelove]

You could do it with regular expressions, actually; no actual code needed. Stick a Chinese word list (for example, a list of all of the Chinese headwords from CC-CEDICT) in a text editor with grep support, then do the following find-and-replaces with grep enabled:

Find:

(

1. )

(so it's a list of all of your characters with a ([ before them and a ]) after them)

Replace With:

@\1

(basically, adding a @ before every included character)

Then Find:

^[^@\r\n][^\r\n]*\n

And replace with nothing (deleting every word that begins with a character not in your list), also Find:

^[^\r\n]*[^@\r\n]{2,}[^\r\n]*\n

And replace with nothing (deleting every word that contains a character that's not in your list), finally Find:

@

and replace with nothing. (removing the superfluous @s)

Haven't actually tested this, and there's probably a more efficient way to do it, but I think it would work.