Read Me Notes 2018-10-21 created in Notepad++

There are 4 .bas files
1. BAT counter for Halloween Challenge to count number of times BAT appears forward and backward, 8 Directions in all, in Letter Grid.

	8 Directions for searching words from a given x, y location on grid.

		 6    7    8
		   D  D  D
			R R R
			 OOO
		 5 DROWORD 1
			 OOO
			R R R
		   D  D  D
		 4    3    2

2. TRICK TREAT counter also a mod for Halloween Challenge to count number of TRICKs and TREATs in Halloween Challenge Letters block. Apologies for the crummy Puzzle, it is direction poor in variations but fun idea.

These 2 puzzles are a twist on the standard newspaper puzzle where you search for a word find it and then move onto the next. I was surprised to find that EAT appears twice in my 2 year old Thanksgiving Puzzle (included in this pack) how appropriate for the theme of the puzzle! I would never had know until I added counter functionality to the Word Search code.

3. Word Search v1 is the first generic solver that can be applied to puzzles up to 40 letters across (but 20 or less are better to space the letters) and a max of 20 rows. 

	To setup say a newspaper solver:
		1. Type the letters block into a text file, no spaces or blank lines because the code sets the Shared Variabled Rows and Cols from the lines count and length of first string. Decide a BaseName and name the .txt file "BaseName Letters.txt"
		2. Type up one column of words > 2 letters < 15 will be added to list and counted to Shared variable Nwords. Name the file with same BaseName as the Letters file: "BaseName Words.txt"

	Then to run that file from either Word Search v1 or v2 type the BaseName into the variable FileBaseName$ at the top of the listing.

	Here is what is started from this pack: 

		DIM SHARED FileBaseName$
		FileBaseName$ = "BAT"
		'FileBaseName$ = "TRICK TREAT"
		'FileBaseName$ = "Thanksgiving"
		'FileBaseName$ = "Finance" 'fresh out of PD 2018-10-16  Tues
		'FileBaseName$ = "NewAgeAltCare" 'fresh out of PD 2018-10-18  Thurs
	
	So there is 2 files for each base name a Letters.txt file and a Words.txt file.
	
4. Word Search v2 includes code from v1 PLUS a second method to do a Word Search that I was very curious if I could get going. It is much longer and more complicated method of searching for words from "rotated array word strings". Either method can be run just comment out the other in the main loop of code. You will see the biggest difference in how they work running the BAT file. v2 also has a labeled grid to help locate words in letter array.

Thanks for reading and trying code. B+

Mark




