Wordsmith

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This project was inspired by a book that makes me laugh all the time, I Forced a Bot to Write This Book: A.I. Meets B.S. by Keaton Patti. With Wordsmith, the user can enter an ordinary sentence and “synonimize” it. The site connects to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary API and replaces each word in the sentence for one of its synonyms. The returned sentences are strange, surprising, and lots of fun.

This project was inspired by a book that makes me laugh all the time, I Forced a Bot to Write This Book: A.I. Meets B.S. by Keaton Patti. With Wordsmith, the user can enter an ordinary sentence and “synonimize” it....The site connects to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary API and replaces each word in the sentence for one of its synonyms. The returned sentences are strange, surprising, and lots of fun.

Role

Independently built the site's simple front end and routed the API using JavaScript.

Goals

My primary aim was to challenge myself to route an API and to keep my JavaScript skills sharp.

Challenges

This site was a great way to deepen my JavaScript skills while learning about routing API's. While the idea is simple, a lot of tweaking had to be done to account for punctuation and to leave common words untouched to ensure it would be legible. Below is a snippet from the code in which I am working through those challenges.

for(let word of theWords){
theWord = word;
//dealing with punctuation
while( ["?", ".", "!", ",", '"', "-",].includes(theWord[theWord.length-1])) {
endingPunctuation = theWord[theWord.length-1]+endingPunctuation;
theWord = theWord.substring(0,(theWord.length-1));
}
while( ["?", ".", "!", ",", '"'].includes(theWord[0])) {
beginningPunctuation = beginningPunctuation + theWord[0];
theWord = theWord.substring(1,(theWord.length));
}
//adding beginning punctuation.
res+= beginningPunctuation;
beginningPunctuation = "";
if(theResponse == []){
res += theWord;
}
//common words
if(["i","you","he","she","we","they", "is", "are", "was", "were", "the", "a", "an", "can", "me", "her","him", "us"].includes(theWord.toLowerCase())){
res += theWord;
}
else if(theResponse[0].meta && theResponse != []){
let synonymArrays = theResponse[0].meta.syns;
let synonymArray = synonymArrays[0];
let synonym = synonymArray[Math.floor(Math.random()*synonymArray.length)];
console.log(`the synonym is ${synonym}`);
res += synonym;
}
else{
res += theWord;
}
res += endingPunctuation;
res += " "
endingPunctuation="";
}
answerText.innerText = res;
}