Homonym translator

Alec Jacobson

March 13, 2011

weblog/

I wrote a little ruby program that accepts a string and translates as many words as it can to homonyms. Save this in a file called homotranslate.rb:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w

class Homo
  def initialize(filename)
    lines = File.open(filename, "r").readlines;
    homonyms = lines.collect{|e| e.strip.split(' ')};
    @homo_map = Hash.new;
    homonyms.each{|h| h.each{|e| @homo_map[e] = h - [e]; }; };
  end

  def random_translate(str)
    str.gsub(/\w+/) do |word| 
      lw = word.downcase;
  
      if(@homo_map[lw].nil? || word.size == 0)
        word;
      else
        homonym = @homo_map[lw][rand(@homo_map[lw].size)];
        if(word[0] >= 'A'[0] and word[0] <= 'Z'[0])
          homonym.capitalize!
        end
        homonym;
      end
    end
  end
end


# Default main program
if $0 == __FILE__
  homo = Homo.new("homonyms.txt");
  puts homo.random_translate(ARGF.read);
end
__END__

Then run with:

echo "I owe you." | ruby homotranslate.rb

Or just try it online now: Random homonym translator web app Source ASCII list of homonyms, one set per line, space separated