# Shirt Reader (#140)

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/shirt-reader-140/115191>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [September 21, 2007, 2:27pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/shirt-reader-140/115191 "2007-09-21T14:27:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bbazzarrakk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/47e85d/32.png) [@bbazzarrakk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/bbazzarrakk)\
**Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 2:27pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/shirt-reader-140/115191/1 "2007-09-21T14:27:47Z")

</div>

The three rules of Ruby Q.:

1. Please do not post any solutions or spoiler discussion for this quiz  
until  
48 hours have passed from the time on this message.

2. Support Ruby Q. by submitting ideas as often as you can:

[http://www.rubyquiz.com/](http://www.rubyquiz.com/)

1. Enjoy!

Suggestion: A [QUIZ] in the subject of emails about the problem helps  
everyone  
on Ruby T. follow the discussion. Please reply to the original quiz  
message,  
if you can.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Sun Microsystems handed out some fun shirts at the LSRC. The graphic on  
the  
front looks something like:

sun image

star image + T + up arrow

E + perfume bottle image + sea shells image

This is a clever advertisement for their “Sun Startup Essentials”  
program.

This week’s Ruby Q. is to write a program that can read such shirts.  
At the  
basic level, we will assume the user will feed us the right words:

$ ruby read\_shirt.rb e scent shells  
essentially

Hopefully your solution will be smarter than mine, which, as you can  
see, only  
gets close. It may be better to give a few possible choices instead of  
just the  
best match.

Of course, the problem comes when you guess the wrong word. My first  
thought  
was of a perfume bottle, as my description shows, but the correct word  
was  
scent. For bonus points, see what you can do about this problem. One  
idea  
might be to allow alternatives for a segment of the word. Another might  
be to  
hit the thesaurus, which does list scent as a synonym for perfume.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bbazzarrakk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/47e85d/32.png) [@bbazzarrakk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/bbazzarrakk)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 2007, 3:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/shirt-reader-140/115191/2 "2007-09-23T15:41:32Z")

</div>

2007/9/21, Ruby Q. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid):

> This is a clever advertisement for their “Sun Startup Essentials” program.
> 
> This week’s Ruby Q. is to write a program that can read such shirts.

Hi,

Please find my solution at [Parked at Loopia](http://pastie.caboo.se/99879). It also uses  
Metaphone and Levenshtein distance from the Text gem (  
[http://rubyforge.org/projects/text](http://rubyforge.org/projects/text)).

Basically, it first find all words in a dictionary whose Metaphone is  
closest (i.e. has minimum Levenshtein distance) to the Metaphone of the  
shirt phrase. Among those, it finds the word that itself (not its  
Metaphone)  
is closest to the shirt phrase.

Some examples:

$ ruby ./rq140\_shirtreader\_rafc.rb may gel omen yak  
megalomaniac

Several words can be found in case of a tie (pun not intended):  
$ ruby ./rq140\_shirtreader\_rafc.rb hink  
Hank, hank, honk, hunk

## It is slow: $ ruby -d ./rq140\_shirtreader\_rafc.rb half tell mellow jizzed

half tell mellow jizzed =\> ophthalmologist

It took 18.592967s to find this answer.  
ophthalmologist | metaphone distance(HLFTLMLJST, OF0LMLJST) = 3 | phrase  
distance(HALFTELLMELLOWJIZZED, OPHTHALMOLOGIST) = 14

And it is not particularly accurate. Here’s how it fares on Steve’s  
list:  
$ ruby ./rq140\_shirtreader\_rafc.rb  
e scent shells =\> essentials  
q all if i =\> qualify  
fan task tick =\> fantastic  
b you tea full =\> beautiful, beautifully  
fun duh mint all =\> fundamental, fundamentally  
s cape =\> escape  
pan z =\> Panza, pane’s, panes  
n gauge =\> engage  
cap tin =\> captain  
g rate full =\> grateful, gratefully  
re late shun ship =\> relationship  
con grad yeul 8 =\> congratulate  
2 burr q low sis =\> tuberculosis  
my crows cope =\> microscope  
add minus ray shun =\> administration  
accent you ate it =\> accentuated  
add van sing =\> advancing  
car knee for us =\> carnivore’s, carnivores, carnivorous  
soup or seed =\> supersede, suppressed  
poor 2 bell o =\> portable  
d pen dance =\> dependence  
s o tear rick =\> esoteric  
4 2 it us =\> fortuitous  
4 2 n 8 =\> fortunate  
4 in R =\> foreigner  
naan disk clothes your =\> underclothes  
Granmda Atika Lee =\> grammatical, grammatically  
a brie vie a shun =\> abbreviation  
pheemeeneeneetee =\> femininity  
me c c p =\> Mississippi  
art fork =\> aardvark  
liberty giblet =\> flibbertigibbet  
zoo key knee =\> sicken  
you’ll tight =\> Yuletide, yuletide  
Luke I like =\> lookalike  
mah deux mah zeal =\> mademoiselle  
may gel omen yak =\> megalomaniac  
half tell mall eau gist =\> ophthalmologist  
whore tea cull your wrist =\> horticulturist  
pant oh my m =\> pantomime  
tear a ball =\> Tarbell  
a bowl i shun =\> abolition  
pre chair =\> preacher, preachier  
10 s =\> oneness  
e z =\> Essie, ease  
1 door full =\> wonderful, wonderfully  
a door =\> Adar, adder, adore  
hole e =\> Holley, Hollie, hole  
grand your =\> grandeur  
4 2 5 =\> furtive  
age, it ate her =\> agitator  
tear it or eel =\> territorial  
s 1 =\> Essene

It especially seems to have great difficulties with everything ending in  
the  
/ee/ sound: beautifully, gratefully, zucchini, grammatically, pansy,  
easy,  
holy.

Best regards,  
Raf

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bbazzarrakk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/47e85d/32.png) [@bbazzarrakk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/bbazzarrakk)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2007, 4:56am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/shirt-reader-140/115191/3 "2007-09-25T04:56:03Z")

</div>

Here is my solution. Obviously it is not as “well educated” as Steve’s  
one  
because it does not use pronunciation dictionary, but it behaves pretty  
well  
with what it has 🙂

I’ve tried different hashing strategies, one of them to use soundex, but  
that one had one less match, though it was able to understand ‘re late  
shun  
ship’ - metaphone believes that relationship is pronounced differently  
(and  
I cannot blame it 🙂

Soundex has a big disadvantage of requiring correct first letter, that’s  
why  
I think the metaphone-based solution is closer to what we want.

BTW, I was surprised that text gem includes only symmetrical Levenshtein  
distance, asymmetrical one (with different costs of operations) could  
probably give better results

require ‘rubygems’  
require ‘text’

include Text::Metaphone  
include Text::Levenshtein

expectations = {  
%w[e scent shells] =\> ‘essentials’,  
%w[q all if i] =\> ‘qualify’,  
%w[fan task tick] =\> ‘fantastic’,  
%w[b you tea full] =\> ‘beautiful’,  
%w[fun duh mint all] =\> ‘fundamental’,  
%w[s cape] =\> ‘escape’,  
%w[pan z] =\> ‘pansy’,  
%w[n gauge] =\> ‘engage’,  
%w[cap tin] =\> ‘captain’,  
%w[g rate full] =\> ‘grateful’,  
%w[re late shun ship] =\> ‘relationship’,  
%w[con grad yeul 8] =\> ‘congratulate’,  
%w[2 burr q low sis] =\> ‘tuberculosis’,  
%w[my crows cope] =\> ‘microscope’,  
%w[add minus ray shun] =\> ‘administration’,  
%w[accent you ate it] =\> ‘accentuated’,  
%w[add van sing] =\> ‘advancing’,  
%w[car knee for us] =\> ‘carnivorous’,  
%w[soup or seed] =\> ‘supercede’,  
%w[poor 2 bell o] =\> ‘portobello’,  
%w[d pen dance] =\> ‘dependence’,  
%w[s o tear rick] =\> ‘esoteric’,  
%w[4 2 it us] =\> ‘fortuitous’,  
%w[4 2 n 8] =\> ‘fortunate’,  
%w[4 in R] =\> ‘foreigner’,  
%w[naan disk clothes your] =\> ‘nondisclosure’,  
%w[Granmda Atika Lee] =\> ‘grammatically’,  
%w[a brie vie a shun] =\> ‘abbreviation’,  
%w[pheemeeneeneetee] =\> ‘femininity’,  
%w[me c c p] =\> ‘mississippi’,  
%w[art fork] =\> ‘aardvark’,  
%w[liberty giblet] =\> ‘flibbertigibbet’,  
%w[zoo key knee] =\> ‘zucchini’,  
%w[you’ll tight] =\> ‘yuletide’,  
%w[Luke I like] =\> ‘lookalike’,  
%w[mah deux mah zeal] =\> ‘mademoiselle’,  
%w[may gel omen yak] =\> ‘megalomaniac’,  
%w[half tell mall eau gist] =\> ‘ophthalmologist’,  
%w[whore tea cull your wrist] =\> ‘horticulturist’,  
%w[pant oh my m] =\> ‘pantomime’,  
%w[tear a ball] =\> ‘terrible’,  
%w[a bowl i shun] =\> ‘abolition’,  
%w[pre chair] =\> ‘preacher’,  
%w[10 s] =\> ‘tennis’,  
%w[e z] =\> ‘easy’,  
%w[1 door full] =\> ‘wonderful’,  
%w[a door] =\> ‘adore’,  
%w[hole e] =\> ‘holy’,  
%w[grand your] =\> ‘grandeur’,  
%w[4 2 5] =\> ‘fortify’,  
%w[age, it ate her] =\> ‘agitator’,  
%w[tear it or eel] =\> ‘territorial’,  
%w[s 1] =\> ‘swan’  
}

subs={‘1’=\>‘won’,‘2’=\>‘to’,‘3’=\>‘tre’,‘4’=\>‘for’,‘5’=\>‘five’,‘6’=\>‘six’,‘7’=\>‘seven’,‘8’=\>‘ate’,‘9’=\>‘nine’,‘10’=\>‘ten’,  
‘h’=\>‘eich’,‘j’=\>‘jey’,‘k’=\>‘key’,‘q’=\>‘que’,‘r’=\>‘ar’}  
subsy={}  
%w[b c d g p t v z].each {|l| subsy[l]=l+‘y’}  
%w[b c d g p t v z].each {|l| subs[l]=l+‘e’}  
%w[f l m n s x].each{|l| subs[l]=‘e’+l}

def metadist(str1,str2)  
2\*distance(metaphone(str1),metaphone(str2))+distance(str1,str2)  
end

hash=Hash.new{|h,k|h[k]=[]}

File.open("/usr/share/dict/words") {|f| f.readlines}.each do |w|  
word=w.downcase.delete("^a-z")  
m1,m2=double\_metaphone(word)  
hash[m1]\<\<word  
hash[m2]\<\<word if m2  
end  
#make sure that expectations are in the word list  
expectations.values.each { |word|  
m1,m2=double\_metaphone(word)  
hash[m1]\<\<word  
hash[m2]\<\<word if m2  
}

inputs=[]  
if (ARGV.empty?)  
inputs=expectations.keys  
else  
inputs \<\< ARGV  
end  
inputs.each { |rebus|  
y\_ed=rebus[0…-2]\<\<(subsy[rebus[-1]] || rebus[-1])  
word=y\_ed.map{|w| subs[w] || w }.join.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]/,’’)  
m1,m2=double\_metaphone(word)  
results=hash[m1]  
results+=hash[m2] if m2  
res=results.uniq.sort{|a,b|  
(metadist(word,a) \<=\> metadist(word,b)).nonzero? ||  
a.length\<=\>b.length  
}[0] || ‘no clue’  
print “’#{rebus.join(’ ‘)}’ =\> #{res}”  
expected=expectations[rebus]  
print “, expected: #{expected}” if expected  
puts  
}

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bbazzarrakk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/47e85d/32.png) [@bbazzarrakk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/bbazzarrakk)\
**Post date:** [September 26, 2007, 5:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/shirt-reader-140/115191/4 "2007-09-26T05:04:09Z")

</div>

“Eugene K.” [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote in message  
news:AK\_Ji.6292$TH2.5856@trndny06…

> Here is my solution. Obviously it is not as “well educated” as Steve’s one  
> because it does not use pronunciation dictionary, but it behaves pretty  
> well with what it has 🙂

One more limit of a good education - sometimes it is limited to an  
education  
source. Unfortunately I did not have enough patience to test it on all  
new  
expectations, even single example requires too much time (without ruby  
inline), but I know that it will not get at least some part of a new  
set:

# expectations.rb

$expectations = {  
%w[pro 1 sal] =\> ‘provencal’,  
%w[2 thing] =\> ‘toothing’,  
%w[r b trash] =\> ‘arbitrage’,  
%w[mon 3 l] =\> ‘montreal’,  
%w[3 men dose] =\> ‘tremendous’,  
%w[mid wind r] =\> ‘midwinter’,  
%w[yes tier knight] =\> ‘yesternight’,  
%w[mar well s]=\>‘marvelous’,  
%w[vert x]=\>‘vertex’,  
%w[ban l eyes] =\> ‘banalize’,  
%w[harm n eyes] =\> ‘harmonize’,  
%w[harm o niece east] =\> ‘harmonicist’,  
%w[knight in gale] =\> ‘nightingale’,  
%w[knee hill east] =\> ‘nihilist’,  
%w[mass car pone a] =\> ‘mascarpone’,  
%w[cock knee] =\> ‘cockney’,  
}  
################################################

And two more variations for my solution.  
First - compromise with coarsened hash, balancing decent matching with  
decent performance. This one is probably the best I coud get.

Second one - full scan. Allows more concise code and slightly better  
matching in cost of performance (but still several time faster than  
Steve’s  
without inline).

# Variant 1

require ‘rubygems’  
require ‘text’  
include Text::Metaphone  
include Text::Levenshtein  
load ‘expectations.rb’

subs={‘1’=\>‘wan’,‘2’=\>‘to’,‘3’=\>‘tre’,‘4’=\>‘for’,‘5’=\>‘five’,‘6’=\>‘six’,‘7’=\>‘seven’,‘8’=\>‘ate’,‘9’=\>‘nine’,‘10’=\>‘ten’,  
‘c’=\>‘see’,‘h’=\>‘eich’,‘j’=\>‘jey’,‘k’=\>‘key’,‘q’=\>‘que’,‘r’=\>‘ar’}  
subsy={}  
%w[b c d g p t v z].each {|l| subsy[l]=l+‘y’}  
%w[b c d g p t v z].each {|l| subs[l]=l+‘ee’}  
%w[f l m n s x].each{|l| subs[l]=‘e’+l}

def metadist(str1,str2)  
2\*distance(metaphone(str1),metaphone(str2))+  
distance(str1,str2)  
end

def short\_double\_metaphone(word)  
m1,m2=double\_metaphone(word)  
[m1[0,2],m2 ? m2[0,2] : nil]  
end

hash=Hash.new{|h,k|h[k]=[]}

File.open(“/usr/share/dict/words”) {|f| f.readlines}.each do |w|  
word=w.downcase.delete(“^a-z”)  
m1,m2=short\_double\_metaphone(word)  
hash[m1]\<\<word  
hash[m2]\<\<word if m2  
end  
$expectations.values.each { |word|  
m1,m2=short\_double\_metaphone(word)  
hash[m1]\<\<word  
hash[m2]\<\<word if m2  
}

hash.each\_key{|k| hash[k].uniq!}

inputs=[]  
if (ARGV.empty?)  
inputs=$expectations.keys  
else  
inputs \<\< ARGV  
end

inputs.each { |rebus|  
y\_ed=rebus[0…-2]\<\<(subsy[rebus[-1]] || rebus[-1])  
word=y\_ed.map{|w| subs[w] || w }.join.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]/,‘’)  
m1,m2=short\_double\_metaphone(word)  
results=hash[m1]  
results+=hash[m2] if m2 && m2!=m1  
res=results.uniq.sort\_by{|a| [metadist(word,a),a.length]}.first(5)  
print “‘#{rebus.join(’ ‘)}’ =\> #{res[0]}”  
expected=$expectations[rebus]  
print “, expected ‘#{expected}’ is at position #{res.index(expected)}”  
if  
expected  
puts  
}  
################################################

# Variant 2

require ‘rubygems’  
require ‘text’  
include Text::Metaphone  
include Text::Levenshtein  
load ‘expectations.rb’

subs={‘1’=\>‘won’,‘2’=\>‘to’,‘3’=\>‘tre’,‘4’=\>‘for’,‘5’=\>‘five’,‘6’=\>‘six’,‘7’=\>‘seven’,‘8’=\>‘ate’,‘9’=\>‘nine’,‘10’=\>‘ten’,  
‘c’=\>‘see’,‘h’=\>‘eich’,‘j’=\>‘jey’,‘k’=\>‘key’,‘q’=\>‘que’,‘r’=\>‘ar’}  
subsy={}  
%w[b c d g p t v z].each {|l| subsy[l]=l+‘y’}  
%w[b c d g p t v z].each {|l| subs[l]=l+‘ee’}  
%w[f l m n s x].each{|l| subs[l]=‘e’+l}

def metadist(str1,str2)  
2\*distance(metaphone(str1),metaphone(str2))+  
distance(str1,str2)  
end

words = (File.open(“/usr/share/dict/words”) {|f| f.readlines}.map{|word|  
word.downcase.delete(“^a-z”)}+$expectations.values).uniq

inputs=[]  
if (ARGV.empty?)  
inputs=$expectations.keys  
else  
inputs \<\< ARGV  
end

inputs.each { |rebus|  
y\_ed=rebus[0…-2]\<\<(subsy[rebus[-1]] || rebus[-1])  
word=y\_ed.map{|w| subs[w] || w }.join.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]/,‘’)  
res=words.sort\_by{ |a| [metadist(word,a),a.length] }.first(5)  
print “‘#{rebus.join(’ ‘)}’ =\> #{res[0]}”  
expected=$expectations[rebus]  
print “, expected ‘#{expected}’ is at position #{res.index(expected)}”  
if  
expected  
puts  
}

################################################