Longest words in dictionary that can be constructed from a list of letters

The problem is to find the longest words in a dictionary of legal words that can be constructed from a given list of letters.

For example:

$ ./scrabble dictionary.txt i g h l p r a
argil glair grail graph hilar laigh phial pilar ralph

More details here.

I've already solved this problem in Python (see this).

To brush up my C++ I decided to reproduce the exact same algorithm in C++. I learned C++ as "C with classes" and never learned to use the STL properly, so I usually end up writing more code than necessary to accomplish simple things.

This is what I came up with for this problem:

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

using namespace std;

bool can_make(string word, vector letters);
int get_max_len(vector words);

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    // Grab the dictionary.
    fstream dict_file(argv[1]);
    string in;
    vector dict_words;
    while(getline(dict_file, in)) dict_words.push_back(in);
    dict_file.close();

    // Get the list of input letters.
    vector letters;
    for (int i = 2; i  all_words;
    vector::iterator it;
    for (it = dict_words.begin(); it  longest_words;
    for (it = all_words.begin(); it  letters)
{
    /*
        Return true if the word  can be generated by all letters in 
        and only the letters in .
    */

    if (word.length() > letters.size()) return false;

    vector l(letters);
    vector word_letters(word.c_str(), word.c_str()+word.length());
    vector::iterator it, loc;

    // Iterate through . If a letter in  also
    // appears in , remove it. Otherwise, return false.
    for (it = word_letters.begin(); it  words)
{
    /*
        Return the length of the longest word(s) in .
    */

    int max_len = 0;
    vector::iterator it;
    for (it = words.begin(); it  max_len)
            max_len = (*it).length();

    return max_len;
}

• Is this idiomatic C++?

• How can I make this code more concise?

• How can I make it more correct?

• What C++11 features can I use here to make th

Preface

I am not sure the algorithm you have chosen is the best one. Sorting the letters, or using a frequency table of the letters, are obvious alternatives. However, this is code review, and not algorithm review.

So here we go:

Iterators

Don't use ` is an example where

• There is no need for dict_file.close() as the destructor will close the file at the right time.

StackExchange Code Review Q#6634, answer score: 8