Changing Gender

July 26, 2016

The culture wars have my head spinning so fast that I need a computer to help me out. One day I might say “He is my brother.” and the very next day, speaking about the same person, say “She is my sister.”

Your task is to write a program that changes the gender of the words in a string. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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Posted by programmingpraxis
Filed in Exercises
1 Comment »

One Response to “Changing Gender”

  1. James Curtis-Smith said
    July 26, 2016 at 2:44 PM

    Similar solution to yours but in Perl… I create the map in three parts – for those words for which you can only map one way (actually they have an alternative mapping elsewhere) – those words for which I can pluralise with “s” and those I can’t…
    By extending the map with the ucfirst and uc versions of the strings – I can then just use a “join map split” to do the translation.

    my %map = qw(
  aunty   uncle  aunties uncles miss    mr     mrs     mr
  dame    sir    lord    lady   lords   ladies);

## Entries for which we can just add an "s" to pluralize
my @map_plural_s = qw(
  boy       girl      boyfriend girlfriend father    mother    husband   wife
  son       daughter  brother   sister     sir       madam     uncle     aunt
  male      female    widower   widow
);
## Make all 4 mappings...
while( my($a,$b) = splice @map_plural_s, 0, 2 ) {
  $map{$a}=$b;
  $map{$b}=$a;
  $map{$a.'s'}=$b.'s';
  $map{$b.'s'}=$a.'s';
}

## Entries for which we can't just add an S to make them plural
my @map_no_plural = qw(
  man woman men women gentleman lady gentlemen ladies his her
);
## Make both mappings...
while( my($a,$b) = splice @map_no_plural, 0, 2 ) {
  $map{$a}=$b;
  $map{$b}=$a;
}

## Now add the ucfirst and uc versions of the words...
$map{ucfirst $_} = ucfirst $map{$_} foreach keys %map;
$map{uc $_     } = uc      $map{$_} foreach keys %map;

sub r {
  return join q(), map { $map{$_}||$_ } split m{\b}, shift;
}

print r( "My Brother's girlfriend is taking HER sister to the movies." );

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