Emulate Crossword Apps:Best crossword for Your Devices.

Okay, so today I decided to mess around with something I’ve been thinking about for a while – trying to emulate a crossword puzzle, just the basic structure, you know? No fancy solving algorithms or anything, just getting the grid right.

First Steps: Thinking it Through

I started by, well, staring at a blank screen for a bit. How do you even begin to represent a crossword? My first thought was a simple 2D array. You know, a grid of letters. Easy peasy… or so I thought.

The Array Approach

I fired up my trusty text editor and started coding. I figured I’d use a period (‘.’) for empty squares and letters for filled-in ones. So, I created a basic array like this:

grid = [
['.', '.', '.', '.', '.'],
['.', '.', '.', '.', '.'],
['.', '.', '.', '.', '.'],
['.', '.', '.', '.', '.'],
['.', '.', '.', '.', '.']

Cool, cool. A 5×5 grid. But how do I make those black squares? I thought, “Okay, I’ll just use another character, maybe a ‘#’ for the black squares.” So I manually changed some of the periods to hashes:

grid = [
['.', '.', '#', '.', '.'],
['.', '.', '#', '.', '.'],
['#', '#', '#', '#', '#'],
['.', '.', '#', '.', '.'],
['.', '.', '#', '.', '.']

Making it More Dynamic

This worked, but it was super clunky. I didn’t want to manually set every single square. What if I wanted a bigger grid? Or a different pattern? So, I decided to write a little function to create the grid for me.

I thought I could do something like:

def create_grid(size, blocked_squares):
grid = [['.' for _ in range(size)] for _ in range(size)]
for row, col in blocked_squares:
grid[row][col] = '#'
return grid

See, I first made a full grid with empty slot in every position. Then, I loop through the coordinate of the black square and replace it one by one.

Testing and Tweaking

I then tested with the code like these

blocked = [(0, 2), (1, 2), (2, 0), (2, 1), (2, 2), (2, 3), (2, 4), (3, 2), (4, 2)]
my_grid = create_grid(5, blocked)

I could print it out to see if it looked right:

for row in my_grid:
print(' '.join(row))

And it worked! I could now easily create grids of different sizes and with different black square patterns. This isn’t a full crossword solver, of course. It’s just the very, very basic starting point, But it was fun to figure out how to represent the grid and get the black squares in the right places. I can build on this to add word placement and maybe even try to make a simple solver later on.