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.
Programming Praxis 
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." );