Programming interview tip : Finding anagrams

Find all the words in a list of words (listA) which are anagrams of a single input word (wordA).

Bad solution (the trap): 
look at all the possible permutations of wordA and find them in listA.

This is a terrible solution and has a complexity of countOfCharactersInWord(wordA)!
where ! is the factorial symbol :)

Good solution:
take all the characters in wordA and sort them. Then compare it with the each item in listA first sorting the characters of that item as well :)

In python :

	#the wordlist file is the SCOWL wordlist downloaded from : http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/
	file = open("./SCOWL/wordlist.txt")
	words =[line[:-1] for line in file.readlines()] #remove the newline character.
	file.close()
	#basic anagram comparion algorithm
	def AreSameCharacters(word1,word2):
	word1 = list(word1)
	word2 = list(word2)
	word1.sort()
	word2.sort()
	word1 = "".join(word1).lower()
	word2 = "".join(word2).lower()
	return word1==word2
	def IsAnagramEqual(word1,word2):
	if (word1==word2):
	return False #we do not list the same word as an anagram :)
	if len(word1) != len(word2):
	return False
	if not AreSameCharacters(word1,word2):
	return False
	return True
	#word input by user
	word1 = str(raw_input("Please Input Your Word: ")).strip().lower()
	#single word comparisons:
	for word2 in words:
	if IsAnagramEqual(word1,word2):
	print word2

view raw gistfile1.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This yields for my friend "omair" the following interesting (i made them bold) anagrams:

mario
arimo
moria
omari
maori
moira

I used the SCOWL wordlist for this. You can get the complete working code (including the wordlist) from here:
https://bitbucket.org/basarat/pyanagram/overview
Enjoy!