Finding a word within a string (using a stringbuilder)

[getaway]

How would I go about checking to see if, for example, the word 'happy' can be made out of a string of letters, e.g. 'happybirthday'. In my program they are both sorted first, though, so technically I'm actually looking for 'ahppy' in 'aadbihhpprtyy'... How can I do this using a stringbuilder?

Thanks

[Norm]

Not sure I understand what you are asking. If characters have been inserted into a StringBuilder object, there are methods like charAt() that can be used to look at individual characters in the SB object.

Can you explain in more detail? Where do the letters in the StringBuilder object come from?
Where do the Strings with the letters to search for come from?
Is it a search for matches? If the word has some letters, is the idea to search the SB object to see if it has those letters?

[getaway]

I have an EntryIterator that iterates over every word in the dictionary. They are alphabetized after being sorted, e.g. happy is ahppy.

User inputs jumbled letters and an integer number. The program cycles through the dictionary (using the iterator) and looks for words of the given length (e.g. 5) that can be made with the jumbled letters.

So, if the user enters 'aadbihhpprtyy' and '5', the program should iterate through the dictionary and ultimately return ahppy because 1) its length is 5, and 2) all of its letters exist within the user's jumbled input. Satisfying condition #2 is what I'm not sure how to do.

The instructions given for this part of the project are:
For each letter in the user's jumbled input, if it matches the current position in the dictionary word with [user's input # of] letters, increment the current position. Otherwise, add that letter to a stringbuilder. If all of the letters in the dictionary word (e.g. ahppy) were found in the jumble ('aadbihhpprtyy'), then create a new string from the stringbuilder (the leftover letters). See if that new string can be used to make a second word. In this case, the leftover letters would create "abdhirty" which can be unscrambled to birthday. Ultimately, we find that our original jumble can be unscrambled to the phrase "happy birthday."

[Norm]

Are you having problems using any of the java classes' methods?

Otherwise it looks like a program design problem that involves searching through some arrays.