language translation

[ucbones]

Hi,

My younger sister (12) has written a language called Tyra. I wrote her a rough and ready dictionary, complete with word-for-word translation. All works fine, using a MySQL backend.

At the moment, say someone enters the phrase

"Now is the time for faith to shine"

It takes the sentence, explodes() it at spaces, and then replaces each whole word.

So far, so good, it returns:

"iraydo lida sade monoro lisden shadea solus firé"

Only problem is when punctuation is involved,

e.g.

"Now, faith must shine"

What I want returned here, is the translation:

"iraydo, shadea gadem firé"

But, the "," is retained in the array, and hence no match is found.

I suppose what I want to do is to remove all punctuation, and then put it back at the end, in the right position.

Any ideas?

ucbones

[AstroTeg]

These are fun problems because there's always a couple different solutions lurking out there...

The one that came to mind is more of what I would consider a brute force method. It wouldn't take into account the context or meaning of the sentence. But use the explode() method as you are now to split the string. Then test each element in the array if it has a comma in it. Keep track of that element and where the comma was found, and then remove the comma. Do your search and get the translated word. Then add your comma back in. In theory, the comma will mostlikely always be on the end of the element's string. This logic will fail if the user forgets to put a space between the comma and the next word.

[pjleonhardt]

or you could just change the grammer of the language and have it be word , word word word .

essentially, have spaces on both sides of the punctuation, add em into the database and echo out the same..