Hello Eddie! On Sunday 12 July 2009, Eddie wrote: > Hi guys, > > What I have here is more of a logic problem that I can't get my > head around than a programming problem. I am trying to program an > English to Pig Latin translator. I've got the English to Pig Latin > part down and its working great. > > The part I am having difficulty with is the Pig Latin to English > part. Say I have the word ellohay (hello) which I wish to convert > into English. The first thing I am doing is removing the added ay > at the end and the new word becomes elloh. > > This is where I have the problem. I have to somehow identify which > letters to remove from the end and add back to the front of the > word (i.e. h needs to be removed and added back to the front). > However with a word such as string which translates as ingstray, > when we remove the ay we are left with ingstr, and need to identify > that str needs to be removed and added back on the front. > > I am lost as to how to identify which characters need to be removed > to be re-added to the front and can't find a common rule to program > by. There are translators out there already like this, so it works > somehow, I just need a push in the right direction i think [image: > :)] > > Thanks
I didn't look up the rules for creating Pig Latin. But from looking at your examples: hello --> ellohay, string --> ingstray, I think that information loss occurs in the conversion English --> Pig Latin. This means that the operation can not be reversed with an algorithm that only sees the word in question. The most easy solution IMHO is to download a big English text from the Internet, and translate it to Pig Latin. During the translation you create a big reverse mapping: Pig Latin --> English, which for use in the reverse translator. This method exploits the fact that not each character combination is a valid English word. But there may be collisions: two different English words that have the same Pig Latin translation. It would be interesting to see if such collisions do really occur with English source text. Kind regards, Eike. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
