Alphabet soup

alphabet_soup_doc.txt

Puzzle
=======
Everyone loves alphabet soup.  And of course you want to know if you can construct a message from the letters found in your bowl.

Task:
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Write a function that takes as input two strings:

1. the message you want to write

2. all the letters found in your bowl of alphabet soup. 

Assumptions:
============
· You may assume the soup only contains the 26 capital letters of the English alphabet. 

· Also assume it may be a very large bowl of soup containing many letters. 

· There is no guarantee that each letter occurs a similar number of times - indeed some letters might be missing entirely.

· And of course the letters are ordered randomly.


The function should determine if you can write your message with the letters found in your bowl of soup. The function should return true or false accordingly.

soup.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import string
import random
import collections


def fill_bowl(m):

    soup = list(string.ascii_lowercase)
    soup_list = [random.choice(soup) for n in range(m)]
    bowl = "".join(soup_list)
    return bowl


def alphabet_soup(message, bowl):
    if len(message) > 0:
        bowl_count = collections.Counter(bowl)

        for letter in message:
            if bowl_count[letter] and bowl_count[letter] >= 1:
                bowl_count[letter] -= 1
            else:
                return False
        return True
    else:
        return True

message_size = 500
bowl_size = 10000
message = fill_bowl(message_size)
bowl = fill_bowl(bowl_size)

if alphabet_soup(message, bowl):
    print "We can write: " + message
else:
    print "We can't write: " + message