Clever Person Challenge!

[darrent]

Ok – who is a clever clogs on here?!?!

I basically need some sort of excel/access formula or a VB script (anything!) that will convert a list of telephone numbers into letters i.e. alphanumeric telephone numbers. There are a few bits on the web that convert alphanumeric to numbers but I need it the other way round – anybody any bright ideas??

for the winner

[plotloss]

Dont see how you could do it really, because 2 can be either A, B or C

You could create a list of the all the possible permutations I suppose.

[victormeldrew]

A typical 11 digit phone number would generate at least 3 to the power of 11 results (more if it contains 7's or 9's, as they could be one of four letters). Thats a very big number. The conversion from alhpa to numeric is simple, as there is only one possible result.

[darrent]

Yes there could be variations - are you both saying it can't be done? There is a tool called Alphaphone that does this very thing (shareware) but it only does 1 at a time - I need to do 1000 at a time!!

[plotloss]

Does this Alphaphone have a command line interface?

If so, can you call it iteratively for the 1000 numbers?

What it would require, depending on what you want to get out of it is to take a phone number, create an array of all the permutations (loads) then trundle through the array and look to see if any of the permutations are valid words by looking up against some sort of dictionary.

It can be done, but would take ages to write and quite a while to run as well...

[joust]

darrent said:

Yes there could be variations - are you both saying it can't be done? There is a tool called Alphaphone that does this very thing (shareware) but it only does 1 at a time - I need to do 1000 at a time!!

Why? Why would you want to find out what words are spelt by certain numbers? Surely what you want to know are what the number combinations are for the words that you want to spell, and then you check those against your list of 1000 numbers to see which one to use.

Even if it could be done, do you have the time to look through over 170,000 results to find the one you want?

If you think laterally you might find an easier way to do this...

J

[dern]

Here you go, pint of adnams please...

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;

public class PhoneToAlpha {

private String number;

private static char alphas[][] = {
{ '0' },
{ '1' },
{ 'A', 'B', 'C' },
{ 'D', 'E', 'F' },
{ 'G', 'H', 'I' },
{ 'J', 'K', 'L' },
{ 'M', 'N', 'O' },
{ 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S' },
{ 'T', 'U', 'V' },
{ 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z' },
{ ' ' }
};

public PhoneToAlpha(String number) {
this.number = number;
}

public void generate(PrintWriter out) {
char[][] results = new char[number.length()][4];
for(int i = 0; i < number.length(); i++) {
try {
results = alphas[Integer.parseInt(number.substring(i, i + 1))];
} catch(NumberFormatException e) {
results = alphas[10];
}
}

int counters[] = new int[results.length];
for(int i = 0; i < counters.length; i++) {
counters = 0;
}

int c;
do {
StringBuffer answer = new StringBuffer();
for(int i = 0; i < counters.length; i++) {
answer.append(results[counters]);
}
out.println(this.number + ":" + answer.toString());
for(c = 0; c < counters.length; c++) {
counters[c]++;
if(counters[c] >= results[c].length) {
counters[c] = 0;
} else {
break;
}
}
} while(c != counters.length);
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
String inFile = args[0];
String outFile = args[1];
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(inFile));
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(new FileOutputStream(outFile, false));
String phoneNumber;
while((phoneNumber = in.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println("processing " + phoneNumber);
new PhoneToAlpha(phoneNumber).generate(out);
}
System.out.println("finished");
in.close();
out.close();
} catch(ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException e) {
System.out.println("usage: java PhoneToAlpha source-file results-file");
System.out.println(" where source-file is a text file contain one phone number per line");
} catch(IOException e) {
System.out.println("usage: java PhoneToAlpha source-file results-file");
System.out.println(" error reading or writing to files: " + e.getMessage());
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}


>> Edited by dern on Wednesday 21st July 14:45