Renaissance translator. Huzzah!

An important and common use for computer science ideas is for translating or converting text from one form, or one language, to another. Tools like Google Translate will convert text from one language to another. For this assignment, you'll create a computer translator that will take text and convert it to Renaissance speech, a form of speech used at Renaissance fairs (or perhaps I should say Renaissance Faires) that may or may not be based in historical reality.

Your mission is to create a program to convert English to Renaissance. Create a directory called renaissance for your code, and name your program renaissance.py. Specifically, here are some rules to follow.

Separating the words from the punctuation is kind of tricky in Python. Python makes it easy when things you want to read are separated by spaces, not punctuation. Therefore, your input should have spaces between anything you want Python to read in separately, such as:

Hello ! Please , could you maybe tell me where the restroom is ?

Your program should allow you to type in your input, and print out to the terminal window the translated version of your text. Just to get you started, the below sample code reads a phrase that you enter and then prints out space-delimited words one-by-one, so that in principle you could do something with each word if you wished. Feel free to take a look and use this if it is helpful, but remember to type in yourself any code that you use (copying and pasting with the mouse tends to make you skip actually learning it, whereas retyping it seems to get it to sink in better.)

phrase = input()

for word in phrase.split():
    print(word, end = ' ')

print()

While testing your code, you will likely find that it gets cumbersome to keep retyping your input over and over. It will be much faster if you put your input in a file, and redirect the input to your program to come from that file. In other words, create a file called source.txt (for example) that contains your input text, such as the example in the previous section. Then when you run your program, redirect your input to come from that file. Specifically, at a UNIX prompt, run your program like this:

$ python3 renaissance.py < source.txt

Think of the < as an arrow, directing the text inside source.txt to be the input to your program.

This section is completely optional. If you want to, feel free to try to get your program working without needing to put spaces between words and punctuation. The below sample program is much like the input sample provided above, but separates words whenever the text transitions from a "word character" (i.e., a letter) to a "non-word character", or vice-versa. You're not responsible for knowing how the weird delimiter stuff works in this program, though I'm happy to explain it if anyone asks.

from re import *
from sys import *

phrase = input()

regex = compile('\w+|\W+')
for word in regex.findall(phrase):
    print(word, end="")

print()

As in the last assignment, you should test your code. Do some more examples on your own, work out by hand what the results should be, and see if your program gets them right. We will test your program similarly.

Make sure to also to think through all the possible ways in which your program might go wrong, and test them.

Make sure that your program follows good style. You should it as readable as possible for someone else trying to understand them. At a minimum, you should put a comment at the top explaining what the program does, and use comments above consecutive portions of Python code explaining what they do. You should also use meaningful and readable variable names.

If you complete the above successfully (and have good style in your code), you will receive nearly all the points for the assignment. If you get this far, you should feel proud of your achievements! If you want to push yourself harder and go for the last point, do the following extra challenge.

• Get your program to be able to successfully change the English phrase "thank you" to the Renaissance phrase "grammercy". It should handle capitalization reasonably as for the rest of the assignment. However, if the word "thank" appears on its own without the word "you" immediately following it, the word "thank" should remain unchanged. We will not test the particular complicated case of "thank thank you", so your program can handle that situation however you like and still get the point if the above is working. (Language tweaked 4/10, 7am: using "change" instead of "translate")

When finished, zip up your code and submit your work through Moodle.

Good luck, and have fun! Remember that lab assistants are available in the evenings in CMC 102 and CMC 306 to help out if you need it, and you can attend prefect sessions as well.